What is the practical difference between using async/await and dealing directly with promises in Node.js?

Short answer

async/await is just syntactic sugar built on top of promises that makes code look like synchronous code, allows error handling with try/catch, and improves the readability of stack traces.

Explanation

The essential advantage of async/await lies in ease of reading and preventing nested chained then/catch, unifying synchronous and asynchronous error handling in a single try/catch block, in addition to enabling async stack traces.

Code example

try {
  const user = await getUser(id);
} catch (err) {
  handleError(err);
}

Common mistakes

• Forgetting to add the await keyword, which returns a promise object instead of the required value and produces silent errors.

Follow-up questions

• How do errors travel in asynchronous code and what is the danger of errors inside traditional callbacks?
• What is the top-level await feature in ES modules in Node.js and what are the cautions of using it?

Sources

• MDN — Using promises
• MDN — async function