Why is crypto.subtle.digest designed to return a promise?

Every other system I’ve ever worked with has the signature hash(bytes) => bytes, yet whatever committee designed the Subtle Crypto API decided that the browser version should return a promise. Why? I’ve looked around but I’ve never found any discussion on the motivation behind that.

  • EthanOPEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    That seems like a good guess, I can see why async hashing could be useful. But it would be nice if there was an alternative API that was blocking so my code wouldn’t get infected with async/await all over the place…