Async iterator in Javascript

Question

I'm looking for the best way to make an async iterator in Javascript. I'm already using generators and async/await functions, but I can't find a way to achieve the so-called for-await-of loop without using the latest Node.js release (10.x).

The problem is the following :

I'm fetching large amount of data from an API and I need to scroll the content of it. I don't want to store all the content in an array, as it would explode in RAM.

I know how to do that using streams, but it would be cooler (to my point of view) to do it using generators.

Thanks for your help,

Best regards,

-- Corentin

Answer 1

Async iterators are not available in node.js below v10, but there are some pretty good ways to consume a stream asynchronously without iterators, for example with scramjet:

const stream = DataStream.from(someNodeObjectStream);
await (async () => {
    while (let data = await stream.whenRead()) {
        doSomethingWith(data);
    }
})();

This is more or less the syntactic sugar you get from async iterators.