Handling asynchronous functions in the ES7 way

We already have the Promise API in JavaScript. The upcoming technology is Async/Await API and is presented in a proposal (https://tc39.github.io/ecmascript-asyncawait/) for EcmaScript 7th edition. This describes how we can declare asynchronous functions that can halt without blocking anything and wait for the result of Promise:

"use strict";

// Fetch a random joke
function fetchQuote() {
  return fetch( "http://api.icndb.com/jokes/random" )
  .then(function( resp ){
    return resp.json();
  }).then(function( data ){
    return data.value.joke;
  });
}
// Report either a fetched joke or error
async function sayJoke()
{
  try {
    let result = await fetchQuote();
    console.log( "Joke:", result );
  } catch( err ) {
    console.error( err );
  }
}
sayJoke();

At the moment, the API isn't supported in any browser; however, you can run it using the Babel.js transpiler on runtime. You can also fiddle with this example online at http://codepen.io...