I actually think out of any language async/await makes the most sense for javascript.

In the first example: there is no such thing as a blocking sleep in javascript. What people use as sleep is just a promise wrapper around a setTimeout call. setTimeout has always created microtasks, so calling a sleep inline would do nothing to halt execution.

I do agree that dangling Promises are annoying and Promise.race is especially bad as it doesn't do what you expect: finish the fastest promise and cancel the other. It will actually eventually resolve both but you will only get one result.

Realistically in JS you write your long running async functions to take an AbortController wrapper that also provides a sleep function, then in your outer loop you check the signal isn't aborted and the wrapper class also handles calling clearTimeout on wrapped sleep functions to stop sleeping/pending setTimeouts and exit your loop/function.

> async/await makes the most sense for javascript.

More like: Has no alternative. There are no threads in JS.

I rather like things like the mobx flow action system based on generators - you yield() promises rather than awaiting them and use yield* to splice other functions following the same approach.

You can see a nice example of using that approach standalone here: https://axisofeval.blogspot.com/2024/05/delimited-generators...

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    function blockingSleep(amt) {
        let start = new Date().getTime()
        while (start + amt > new Date().getTime()) {}

    }