Async functions always return a promise - Lets deep into the Async world

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Async functions are a way to make the asynchronous operation synchronously by waiting for the response. Let's see it in the example straight away,

// Normal async function - Returning promise
const getCats = async () => {
  return new Promise((resolve, reject) =>
    setTimeout(
      () =>
        resolve([
          {
            name: 'tiger',
          },
          {
            name: 'jimmy',
          },
        ]),
      2000
    )
  );
};

// Self envoking async function
(async () => {
  console.log(getCats()); // Promise { <pending> }
  const cats = await getCats();
  console.log(cats); // [{ name: 'tiger' }, { name: 'jimmy' }]
})();

As you can see, we are returning a promise in our example.

Now lets see the next example by returning direct JSON array,

// async function - Returning JSON
const getCatsJson = async () => {
  return [
    {
      name: 'tiger',
    },
    {
      name: 'jimmy',
    },
  ];
};

// Self envoking async function
(async () => {
  console.log(getCatsJson()); // Promise { [{ name: 'tiger' }, { name: 'jimmy' }] }
  const catsJson = await getCatsJson();
  console.log(catsJson); // [{ name: 'tiger' }, { name: 'jimmy' }]
})();

As you can check the console log, even though we returned a JSON object from the async function. It was wrapped as a promise. So we still need to await and resolve the promise.

You can always resolve the async without await using promise way,

getCatsJson().then(console.log); // [{ name: 'tiger' }, { name: 'jimmy' }]

You can check the examples here,

Hope, this helps you to understand how async returns the value by wrapping it as a Promise 😋

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