Usage for resource management?

[dead-claudia]

More of a comment than a bug, but here's a use case I discovered playing around with async generators: resource management.

const fsp = require("fs-promise")

async function *open(file, opts) {
    const fd = await fsp.open(file, opts)
    try { yield fd } finally { await fsp.close(fd) }
}

for await (const fd of open("/path/to/file", {mode: "r+"})) {
    const bit = await fsp.read(fd)
    // do other things...
}

// descriptor automatically closed, so no resource leaks!

[littledan]

This seems correct to me, but a strange pun, and it would be unfortunate if it became common for things which would only yield once. Note that synchronous iterators permit the same. I think it'd be nice to look into a mechanism that's more targeted here for resource management, without mixing it with iteration.

[dead-claudia]

@littledan I agree fully with that. It is a hack, and is most certainly counter-intuitive. I agree that resource management shouldn't be crossed with iteration like that, and should at least have a different syntax.

[dead-claudia]

I was merely pointing out an interesting finding.

[littledan]

Yeah, this is interesting. Let's close this thread, as I don't think there's any particular action to take on this proposal.