Doctor Strange's Guide to Asynchronous Operations
Description
A three-panel meme using a scene from the movie 'Avengers: Infinity War' featuring Doctor Strange and Tony Stark (Iron Man). In the first panel, Doctor Strange says, 'I looked forwards in time and saw 78 billion futures.' In the second panel, Iron Man asks, 'How did you see them all so quickly?' In the final panel, Doctor Strange delivers the punchline: 'I didn't await them.' A watermark for 't.me/dev_humor' is visible in the bottom left corner of the last panel. The humor lies in the double meaning of 'futures.' In programming, a 'Future' or 'Promise' is an object that represents the eventual completion (or failure) of an asynchronous operation. The 'await' keyword pauses execution until that promise is resolved. The joke implies that Doctor Strange processed all possible outcomes concurrently, without waiting for each one sequentially, which is a core concept in high-performance, asynchronous programming
Comments
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He didn't await them, which is great for throughput, but I bet error handling was a nightmare. Probably just wrapped the whole multiverse in a global try...catch
Skipping await to look like Doctor Strange is great - right up until 78 billion unhandled rejections show up in Sentry and Ops asks which universe owns the stack trace
Doctor Strange's approach to async operations is exactly how junior developers handle database migrations in production - fire off 78 billion promises, close the laptop, and let the on-call engineer discover which timeline we're in
The real magic isn't seeing 78 billion futures - it's explaining to your PM why spawning them all without awaiting doesn't actually make the feature ship faster, just makes your event loop cry and your memory usage chart look like a hockey stick. Classic case of confusing concurrency with parallelism, though at least Doctor Strange didn't have to deal with JavaScript's single-threaded runtime limitations
I saw 78 billion futures instantly - just didn’t await them; amazing how fast insights arrive when error handling is on-call’s pager
Skipping await is how you “process” 78B futures - until the connection pool keels over, the error budget evaporates, and PagerDuty reminds you why bounded concurrency exists
Strange's multiverse hack: Promise.allSettled(14e6 timelines) without awaiting the cloud bill