Add an inbuilt sleep()

[mikemaccana]

Nearly every JS codebase I've seen since ES2017 has something like:

await new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, 5 * 1000));

copypasted everywhere or, if they're a little better:

export async function sleep(timeout: number): Promise<void> {
  new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, timeout));
}

Yes, people often should be using async functions, Promise.race() etc for many cases where they are using sleep(), but people can and do have legitimate reasons for sleep()ing. It would be great for node to be 'batteries included' and ship sleep().

await sleep(5 * 1000);

I had a look through the API to find the best place to put this. Maybe in the timers API?

[cjihrig]

You can do this:

const sleep = require('timers/promises').setTimeout;
await sleep(5000);

[mikemaccana]

Thanks @cjihrig !

I think people just don't know (I certainly didn't). I can fix that using Twitter and StackOverflow.

For anyone reading this, here's an ES6 version:

const log = console.log;
import { setTimeout } from "node:timers/promises";

log("Waiting");
await setTimeout(5 * 1000);
log("Done waiting");