In JavaScript it’s quite annoying sometimes when you’re not aware of how things work, you start scratching your head but you will not find solution to it. In this article I’m going to discuss one…

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JavaScript in Plain English

Async and await are syntactic sugars for promise nesting. Where await will block the main thread until the promise is resolved. Can you guess the output of below snippet? You’re wrong, the output is 1. Because an async function always returns a promise and rather resolving the promise in above example we are trying to extract the value out of it.

The Problem with Returning Values from Async Await Functions

Can you guess the output of below snippet?

Not sure this is exactly a problem with anything… This is just how Promises are intended to work. The title smells slightly of clickbait making it sound like there’s an issue without a solution

For newcomers, before you do anything with async await you have to learn how promises work, how they resolve and how to access their values.
Async await is just syntactic sugar around them. You’ll do more harm than good if you use this syntax without understanding how it works.
I see posts like these every couple of months explaining async await never even mentioning promises, talking about confusing syntax and weird behaviour.

The return value returns {Promise} without using await on return

The best solution would be to use top-level await. But until it’s widely supported, your solution, or a IIFY would work.

I got into a similar problem during my internship days. It’s a must read for beginners.
Easy to understand, yet we can get it wrong sometimes.