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Discussion on: Vanilla JavaScript vs. RxJs

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Replies for: Hello Tobias, let's see if I can help with your questions. why is there .subscribe? In RxJs you need to subscribe to the observable to consume ...

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Tobias Nickel •

thanks, now you have described the api to me. I see, that in this style of code, everything is treated as a stream. However, an api request, a call via fetch, is fundamentally a single in and a single out. there is no stream of responses. The stream will always only have a single response or a single error. that is what async/await is about, and you get nice meaningfull stacktraces for debugging.

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Riccardo Odone • • Edited

However, an api request, a call via fetch, is fundamentally a single in and a single out.

It doesn't have to be, it can be a response stream:

// https://web.dev/fetch-upload-streaming/

const response = await fetch(url);
const reader = response.body.getReader();

while (true) {
  const { value, done } = await reader.read();
  if (done) break;
  console.log('Received', value);
}

console.log('Response fully received');
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However, I agree most of the time it's not used that way. Still, treating everything as a stream has the advantage of making things composable and re-usable.

In any case, I'm not advocating for any approach. I should have made it more clear in the post. Also, you are right, I could have used async/await in the vanilla JavaScript code to make it look cleaner.