Does supporting the Explicit Resource Management proposal hurt the ecosystem?

[JadenSimon]

To preface: I'm not the type of person to create sensationalist discussions. My main concern here is the impact on the language and the developer experience, and I believe this needs more visibility.

By supporting this proposal, NodeJS is helping to entrench a feature that the author himself acknowledges is less valuable, compared to an alternative, in its current state.

From the proposal author:

IMO, defer is only valuable over using in the short-term until the ecosystem catches up with Symbol.dispose/Symbol.asyncDispose, and that's already happening. NodeJS is already shipping Symbol.asyncDispose on a number of API objects.

This raises doubts about this feature in my mind. If anyone has their own experiences regarding using, I would really like to hear it. This is something the community should weigh in on. I personally found it to be clunky and confusing, especially with closures. I was very surprised when I found out using basically breaks with closures.

[cjihrig]

The proposal is already at Stage 3 at TC39 and is available in Chrome, Deno, and probably more environments that I did not check.

FYI - Node recently removed its polyfills.

[JadenSimon]

Yeah it's been in stage 3 for over a year now I think. I hadn't given it a serious look until last week.

FYI - Node recently #55276.

Interesting, so v8 has the symbols?

[abhi-sojitra]

I appreciate you bringing this up! It’s interesting to hear that using might not be as beneficial as Symbol.dispose/Symbol.asyncDispose. If the community is leaning toward asyncDispose, it seems like a smarter long-term choice.

I’ve had my own struggles with using, especially with closures—it can get pretty messy and confusing. I’d love to hear more from others about their experiences, too!