When is JavaScript synchronous?

Question

I have been under the impression for that JavaScript was always asynchronous. However, I have learned that there are situations where it is not (ie DOM manipulations). Is

Answer 1

Definition

The term "asynchronous" can be used in slightly different meanings, resulting in seemingly conflicting answers here, while they are actually not. Wikipedia on Asynchrony has this definition:

Asynchrony, in computer programming, refers to the occurrence of events independent of the main program flow and ways to deal with such events. These may be "outside" events such as the arrival of signals, or actions instigated by a program that take place concurrently with program execution, without the program blocking to wait for results.

non-JavaScript code can queue such "outside" events to some of JavaScript's event queues. But that is as far as it goes.

No Preemption

There is no external interruption of running JavaScript code in order to execute some other JavaScript code in your script. Pieces of JavaScript are executed one after the other, and the order is determined by the order of events in each event queue, and the priority of those queues.

For instance, you can be absolutely sure that no other JavaScript (in the same script) will ever execute while the following piece of code is executing:

let a = [1, 4, 15, 7, 2];
let sum = 0;
for (let i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
    sum += a[i];
}

In other words, there is no preemption in JavaScript. Whatever may be in the event queues, the processing of those events will have to wait until such piece of code has ran to completion. The EcmaScript specification says in section 8.4 Jobs and Jobs Queues:

Execution of a Job can be initiated only when there is no running execution context and the execution context stack is empty.

Examples of Asynchrony

As others have already written, there are several situations where asynchrony comes into play in JavaScript, and it always involves an event queue, which can only result in JavaScript execution when there is no other JavaScript code executing:

• setTimeout(): the agent (e.g. browser) will put an event in an event queue when the timeout has expired. The monitoring of the time and the placing of the event in the queue happens by non-JavaScript code, and so you could imagine this happens in parallel with the potential execution of some JavaScript code. But the callback provided to setTimeout can only execute when the currently executing JavaScript code has ran to completion and the appropriate event queue is being read.

• fetch(): the agent will use OS functions to perform an HTTP request and monitor for any incoming response. Again, this non-JavaScript task may run in parallel with some JavaScript code that is still executing. But the promise resolution procedure, that will resolve the promise returned by fetch(), can only execute when the currently executing JavaScript has ran to completion.

• requestAnimationFrame(): the browser's rendering engine (non-JavaScript) will place an event in the JavaScript queue when it is ready to perform a paint operation. When JavaScript event is processed the callback function is executed.

• queueMicrotask(): immediately places an event in the microtask queue. The callback will be executed when the call stack is empty and that event is consumed.

There are many more examples, but all these functions are provided by the host environment, not by core EcmaScript. With core EcmaScript you can synchronously place an event in a Promise Job Queue with Promise.resolve().

Language Constructs

EcmaScript provides several language constructs to support the asynchrony pattern, such as yield, async, await. But let there be no mistake: no JavaScript code will be interrupted by an external event. The "interruption" that yield and await seem to provide is just a controlled, predefined way of returning from a function call and restoring its execution context later on, either by JS code (in the case of yield), or the event queue (in the case of await).

DOM event handling

When JavaScript code accesses the DOM API, this may in some cases make the DOM API trigger one or more synchronous notifications. And if your code has an event handler listening to that, it will be called.

This may come across as pre-emptive concurrency, but it is not: once your event handler(s) return(s), the DOM API will eventually also return, and the original JavaScript code will continue.

In other cases the DOM API will just dispatch an event in the appropriate event queue, and JavaScript will pick it up once the call stack has been emptied.

See synchronous and asynchronous events