ALalways_good·Mar 23, 2018
https://github.com/d3/d3-queue has 1360 stars and gets 50% as many daily downloads as d3 itself, so I wouldn't be too sure that nobody out there is using d3's async facilities.
In D3.js 5.0 is outd3
d3-queue
JavaScript2012–2018
d3 / d3-queue
d3-queue
Evaluate asynchronous tasks with configurable concurrency.
5Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Evaluate asynchronous tasks with configurable concurrency.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2012-01-28 23:08:05 UTC to 2018-03-23 05:06:53 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesIts funny, when I landed my first job as a software developer, in a statistical startup, I learned about promises using d3.queue[1]. This was before javascript had native promises, and around the javascript community was settling on A+ promises. But d3 was how I learned to write asynchronous code without relying solely on callbacks.
[1]: https://github.com/d3/d3-queue
In D3.js 5.0 is outThere is also https://github.com/mbostock/queue
415 bytes minified and gzipped!
In RQ – A small JavaScript library for managing asychronicityThere is no need for hacks, just run node with the `--harmony` flag to get yield support today.
Q is a huge, monster library. It's 2x the size of caolan/async, which is already bloated. I personally think it's better to use https://github.com/mbostock/queue or another small, understandable library.
In Kal – a clean JavaScript alternative without callbacksGood catch! It appears I just introduced the bug here, by eliminating recursion: https://github.com/mbostock/queue/commit/7bd5059bb2c0a94c0ca...
Popping multiple synchronous tasks after an asynchronous one is fairly rare, but I’ll make sure the tests verify this code path.
In Analyzing mbostock's queue.jsNot to focus too myopically on the given example, but I can’t help but wonder why it’s a requirement that the first file be handled specially? A less contrived example would make the argument more convincing.
If I wanted to compute the size of one file relative to a set, I’d probably do something like this:
queue()
.defer(fs.stat, "file1.txt")
.defer(fs.stat, "file2.txt")
.defer(fs.stat, "file3.txt")
.awaitAll(function(error, stats) {
if (error) throw error;
console.log(stats[0].size / stats.reduce(function(p, v) { return p + v.size; }, 0));
});
Or, if you prefer a list:
var q = queue();
files.forEach(function(f) { q.defer(fs.stat, f); });
q.awaitAll(…); // as before
This uses my (shameless plug) queue-async module, 419 bytes minified and gzipped: https://github.com/mbostock/queue
A
Read the rest
related question is whether you actually want to parallelize access to the file system. Stat'ing might be okay, but reading files in parallel would presumably be slower since you'd be jumping around on disk. (Although, with SSDs, YMMV.) A nice aspect of queue-async is that you can specify the parallelism in the queue constructor, so if you only want one task at a time, it’s as simple as queue(1) rather than queue(). This is not a data dependency, but an optimization based on the characteristics of the underlying system.
Anyway, I actually like promises in theory. I just feel like they might be a bit heavy-weight and a lot of API surface area to solve this particular problem. (For that matter, I created queue-async because I wanted something even more minimal than Caolan’s async, and to avoid code transpilation as with Tame.) Callbacks are surely the minimalist solution for serialized asynchronous tasks, and for managing parallelization, I like being able to exercise my preference.
I like the generality of the defer/await concepts of TameJs (and by extension, iced coffee). But I was curious if these concepts could be used without code generation, as in Async.js. So I came up with Queue.js:
https://github.com/mbostock/queue
I haven't tried it in production code yet, but it looks like a convenient abstraction with tunable parallelism.
In IcedCoffeeScript