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
    2•22 days ago

    just use await in an async function.

    Sure, I’ll just put await and async everywhere. Oh wait, I can’t. A constructor can’t be async so now I need to restructure my code to use async factories instead of constructors. Wonderful…

    • @[email protected]
      3•22 days ago

      A constructor can’t be async so now I need to restructure my code to use async factories instead of constructors

      It sounds like you’re trying to do OOD/OOP. In js that’s usually not the way to go. You might want to restructure into a more functional architecture anyway.

    • macniel
      2•22 days ago

      Sounds like an architectural issue to begin with. A constructor shouldn’t do the heavy lifting to begin with.

      • EthanOPEnglish
        -2•22 days ago

        You consider calculating the hash of a few bytes to be heavy lifting?

        • macniel
          3•22 days ago

          The API doesn’t restrict the amount of bytes to be hashed. So yeah it’s still heavy lifting.

          Trigger a loading event after the constructor is finished that the view model takes to calculate your hash.