Event-driven programming

Also called event loop

The event loop got its name because of how it's usually implemented, which usually resembles:

while (queue.waitForMessage()) {
  queue.processNextMessage()
}

queue.waitForMessage() waits synchronously for a message to arrive (if one is not already available and waiting to be handled).

"Run-to-completion"

Each message is processed completely before any other message is processed.

This offers some nice properties when reasoning about your program, including the fact that whenever a function runs, it cannot be pre-empted and will run entirely before any other code runs (and can modify data the function manipulates). This differs from C, for instance, where if a function runs in a thread, it may be stopped at any point by the runtime system to run some other code in another thread.

A downside of this model is that if a message takes too long to complete, the web application is unable to process user interactions like click or scroll. The browser mitigates this with the "a script is taking too long to run" dialog. A good practice to follow is to make message processing short and if possible cut down one message into several messages.

Adding messages

In web browsers, messages are added anytime an event occurs and there is an event listener attached to it. If there is no listener, the event is lost. So a click on an element with a click event handler will add a message—likewise with any other event.

The function setTimeout is called with 2 arguments: a message to add to the queue, and a time value (optional; defaults to 0). The time value represents the (minimum) delay after which the message will actually be pushed into the queue. If there is no other message in the queue, and the stack is empty, the message is processed right after the delay. However, if there are messages, the setTimeout message will have to wait for other messages to be processed. For this reason, the second argument indicates a minimum time—not a guaranteed time. Here is an example that demonstrates this concept (setTimeout does not run immediately after its timer expires):

const s = new Date().getSeconds();

setTimeout(function() {
  // prints out "2", meaning that the callback is not called immediately after 500 milliseconds.
  console.log("Ran after " + (new Date().getSeconds() - s) + " seconds");
}, 500)

while (true) {
  if (new Date().getSeconds() - s >= 2) {
    console.log("Good, looped for 2 seconds")
    break;
  }
}

Zero delays

Zero delay doesn't actually mean the call back will fire-off after zero milliseconds. Calling setTimeout with a delay of 0 (zero) milliseconds doesn't execute the callback function after the given interval.

The execution depends on the number of waiting tasks in the queue. In the example below, the message ''this is just a message'' will be written to the console before the message in the callback gets processed, because the delay is the minimum time required for the runtime to process the request (not a guaranteed time).

Basically, the setTimeout needs to wait for all the code for queued messages to complete even though you specified a particular time limit for your setTimeout.

(function() {

  console.log('this is the start');

  setTimeout(function cb() {
    console.log('Callback 1: this is a msg from call back');
  }); // has a default time value of 0

  console.log('this is just a message');

  setTimeout(function cb1() {
    console.log('Callback 2: this is a msg from call back');
  }, 0);

  console.log('this is the end');

})();

// "this is the start"
// "this is just a message"
// "this is the end"
// "Callback 1: this is a msg from call back"
// "Callback 2: this is a msg from call back"

Several runtimes communicating together

A web worker or a cross-origin iframe has its own stack, heap, and message queue. Two distinct runtimes can only communicate through sending messages via the postMessage method. This method adds a message to the other runtime if the latter listens to message events.

Never blocking

A very interesting property of the event loop model is that JavaScript, unlike a lot of other languages, never blocks. Handling I/O is typically performed via events and callbacks, so when the application is waiting for an IndexedDB query to return or an XHR request to return, it can still process other things like user input.

Legacy exceptions exist like alert or synchronous XHR, but it is considered a good practice to avoid them. Beware: exceptions to the exception do exist (but are usually implementation bugs, rather than anything else).