caolan / caolan/highland

Parallel to async waterfall

Open
#192 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
discussion enhancement post-extensibility
Dominant language
JavaScript
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Description

Waterfall is one of the biggest uses of async, and there are some definite parallels to it in Highland:

``` javascript
var async = require('async');
var _ = require('highland');

var f1 = function(arg, callback){
callback(null, arg + 'b');
}

var f2 = function(arg, callback){
callback(null, arg + 'c');
}

var f3 = function(arg, callback) {
callback(null, arg + 'd');
}

function chain(s, f) {
return s.flatMap(_.wrapCallback(f))
}

async.waterfall([async.apply(f1, 'a'), f2, f3], function (err, arg) {
console.log(arg); // 'abcd'
});

_(['a'])
.flatMap(_.wrapCallback(f1))
.flatMap(_.wrapCallback(f2))
.flatMap(_.wrapCallback(f3))
.apply(_.log); // 'abcd'

_([f1, f2, f3])
.reduce(_(['a']), chain)
.flatten()
.apply(_.log); // 'abcd'
```

There are probably other ways to do the same thing, too.

I got to thinking about this from [this blog post](http://blog.vullum.io/javascript-flow-callback-hell-vs-async-vs-highland/) which draws parallels between async and highland, much like `nfcall` does in #171 and like was mentioned in #188.

Thoughts on an explicit `waterfall` parallel in highland? It could implement one of the patterns above, and it might also be able to support passing through multiple arguments. [Async's example](https://github.com/caolan/async#waterfall) does this, but it's a bit of a trick with highland.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

No implementation file or test is identified. Compare the shown Highland flatMap/reduce patterns with async.waterfall and review related issues #171 and #188; a decision is needed on the API and multi-argument behavior before implementation can be considered done.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript
Domain
api
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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