Well, I'm old enough to remember coding for Mac OS 8, where "multitasking" was indeed cooperative - I had to say "oh, you can interrupt me here, if you want" at different places in my code, which meant bad actors could lock the system of course. It wasn't great.
On the other hand, in the uncommon event I do have some weird javascript thing that's going to take a long time (say, parsing some ridiculously-big JSON blob to build a dashboard or something), I know I can break up my parse into promises for each phase and that I won't be locking up other UI processing as badly during that process. So: not exactly multitasking / threading as you say, but still a handy thing to think about.
I'm still totally ignorant of the new primitives in the original link, so maybe that's why I'm confused, but: are you saying that as of today, wrapping a big parsing job into a promise frees up the event loop? I really don't think that's the case, is it? JSON.parse is gonna be blocking/synchronous whenever it happens.
Can you explain a bit more of the implementation you're describing?
You can use setTimeout to "free up the event loop". Using setTimeout(fun, 0) will run fun after the event loop has been freed up IIRC. NodeJS has a function called setImmediate that does exactly that.
JSON.parse as implemented is going to be blocking. But it's possible to implement an asynchronous, non-blocking JSON parser
Not the parsing part, but the processing part. Assume I've got a big pile of data and am calculating stuff like correlations on it. If I break the process up into chunks, I can go chunk.then(nextChunk).then(afterThat) etc etc. JSON.parse still blocks, but it's the post-processing I'm talking about.
On the other hand, in the uncommon event I do have some weird javascript thing that's going to take a long time (say, parsing some ridiculously-big JSON blob to build a dashboard or something), I know I can break up my parse into promises for each phase and that I won't be locking up other UI processing as badly during that process. So: not exactly multitasking / threading as you say, but still a handy thing to think about.