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Asynchronous operations and the event loop

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Many interesting operations in common JavaScript programming environments are asynchronous. For example, in the browser we see things like 

window.setTimeout(() => {  console.log("this happens later");}, 100);

and in Node.js we see things like 

fs.readFile("file.txt", (err, data) => {  console.log("data");});

How does this fit with the event loop?

How this works is that when these statements execute, they tell the host environment (i.e., the browser or Node.js runtime, respectively) to go off and do something, probably in another thread. When the host environment is done doing that thing (respectively, waiting 100 milliseconds or reading the file file.txt) it will post a task to the event loop, saying “call the callback I was given earlier with these arguments”.

The event loop is then busy doing its thing: rendering the webpage, listening for user input, and continually looking for posted tasks. When it sees these posted tasks to call the callbacks, it will call back into JavaScript. That’s how you get asynchronous behavior!

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Event Loop:
* The event loop in a web browser
* Asynchronous operations and the event loop
Table Of Contents
0 Getting started
1 Comments
2 Basic data types
3 Built-in constants
4 Variables
5 Declarations and assignments
6 Reserved keywords
7 Data types in JavaScript
8 Strings
9 Escape sequences
10 Template Literals
11 Arrays
12 Objects
13 Prototypes objects
14 Classes
15 Variable coercion / conversion
16 Map
17 Set
18 Arithmetic Math
19 Bitwise operators
20 Bitwise operators
21 Unary Operators
22 Comparison operations
23 Conditions
24 Loops
25 Functions
26 Arrow functions
27 Date
28 Date comparison
29 Scope
30 AJAX
31 Promises
32 Regular Expression
33 Error Handling
34 Geolocation
35 Cookies
36 Intervals and timeouts
37 Generators
38 History of visited urls
39 Strict mode
40 Custom Elements
41 JSON
42 Binary Data
43 Web Storage
44 Fetch
45 Modules
46 Screen
47 Inheritance
48 Timestamps
49 Destructuring assignment
50 Web Worker
51 Debugging
52 Notifications API
53 WebSockets
54 Web Cryptography API
55 Async functions, async / await
56 Constructor functions
57 execCommand and contenteditable
58 Performance Tips
59 Design patterns
60 requestAnimationFrame
61 Method chaining
62 Global error handling in browsers
63 File API, blobs and FileReaders
64 Console
65 Tail call optimization
66 Detecting browser
67 Enumerations
68 Symbols
69 Localization
70 Selection API
71 Callbacks
72 Functional JavaScript
73 Modals
74 Data attributes
75 Event Loop
76 Events
77 Data manipulation
78 BOM Browser Object Model
79 Unit Testing
80 Linters for ensuring code quality
81 Automatic Semicolon Insertion
82 IndexedDB
83 Anti-patterns
84 Navigator Object
85 Modularization techniques
86 Proxy
87 Same origin policy, cross-origin communication
88 postMessage and MessageEvent
89 WeakMap
90 WeakSet
91 Behaviroal Design Patterns
92 Server-sent events
93 Async iterators
94 Namespacing
95 Evaluating JavaScript
96 Memory efficiency
97 How to make iterator usable inside async callback function
98 Context this
99 Setters and getters
100 Vibration API
101 Fluent API
102 Tilde
103 Security issues
104 Get and set CSS custom variables
105 Contributors