Managing lots of callback recursion in Nodejs
- by Maciek
In Nodejs, there are virtually no blocking I/O operations. This means that almost all nodejs IO code involves many callbacks. This applies to reading and writing to/from databases, files, processes, etc. A typical example of this is the following:
var useFile = function(filename,callback){
posix.stat(filename).addCallback(function (stats) {
posix.open(filename, process.O_RDONLY, 0666).addCallback(function (fd) {
posix.read(fd, stats.size, 0).addCallback(function(contents){
callback(contents);
});
});
});
};
...
useFile("test.data",function(data){
// use data..
});
I am anticipating writing code that will make many IO operations, so I expect to be writing many callbacks. I'm quite comfortable with using callbacks, but I'm worried about all the recursion. Am I in danger of running into too much recursion and blowing through a stack somewhere? If I make thousands of individual writes to my key-value store with thousands of callbacks, will my program eventually crash?
Am I misunderstanding or underestimating the impact? If not, is there a way to get around this while still using Nodejs' callback coding style?
