Async-Improvement

[StarpTech]

Hello Dan,
my name is Dustin Deus I´m software engineer from Germany. I like your array library lazy.js.I have one observation when I use lazy.js with NodeJs you use for async operations the "setTimeout" function with a variable timeout. This works very well when somebody want a timeout but if you just want a fast async iteration I recommend you to use the much more efficient method "process.nextTick" and for all DOM stuff you can use the setImmediate API with great fallbacks. https://github.com/NobleJS/setImmediate
I think this change will increase you library in async speed very well.

[dtao]

Thanks for the suggestion, @BeCreative-Germany! One of my next priorities for Lazy.js is to make it more Node-friendly. Thus far it's been developed primarily for the browser, with Node support sort of just "there"; this sounds like a great step towards that. I will look into it very soon.

[dtao]

This issue has lain dormant for a while. I did some research, and it actually looks like using process.nextTick is not a good idea as it will block any pending I/O events from happening. (In my mind, the whole point of asynchronous iteration would be to allow important work—e.g., I/O work—to continue while iterating.)

I'm probably going to remove the logic to use process.nextTick in the next version of Lazy. I will still use setImmediate, where available (IE, Node.js). For browsers I may also consider using the postMessage hack; however, it might make more sense to just stick with setImmediate since web developers can always include a library like NobleJS/setImmediate if they want to support more browsers.

[dtao]

This has been settled for a while now:

• Lazy doesn't use nextTick as this can take precedence over I/O, which sort of defeats the purpose of async iteration (the idea is to not hold up other operations)
• If interval is undefined, Lazy will use setImmediate if available
• Otherwise it falls back to setTimeout (w/ a default timeout of 0)

I was just leaving this issue open because... well, for no good reason, actually.