Using async/await in the repl

Javascript lends itself really well to writing asynchronous code, but when you open up the JavaScript console in a web browser or the command-line interpreter in Node, it becomes annoying really fast to test out an asynchronous method and see what it returns.

The async/await pattern lends itself really well to writing code in a repl, and while you cannot use await in top-level JavaScript code, you can in the repl!

In the Chrome JavaScript console, you can just use await:

> await fetch('https://official-joke-api.herokuapp.com/random_joke')
    .then(r => r.json())

{id: 4, type: "general", setup: "What do you call a belt made out of watches?", punchline: "A waist of time."}

With Node 10+ you can do --experimental-repl-await (thanks vsemozhetbyt!):

$ node --experimental-repl-await
> await require('fs').promises.readFile('hi.txt', 'utf8')

'hi!\n'

You can also go ahead and set an alias for node to use this flag by default.

Enjoy!