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Why is crypto.subtle.digest async? (self.programming)

submitted 5 months ago by firelizzard to c/programming

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

To add - blocking the main thread on a long running task in the browser can make the page unresponsive. There's not really a way, as far as I know, to "block until a promise completes", which might be the source of the frustration. It seems to me that was intentional by the ones who designed this function.