What is the term used to describe a complete call frame cycle thing in JavaScript?

Question

In JavaScript, there is the concept of the execution pathway beginning at a certain point (such as an event handler), with the control being relinquished back to the browser at some point.

Is there a proper name for this process?

Originally I thought you could refer to this as the "current Stack Frame", but after reading Wikipedia I see that refers to something else. It's not the call stack, that's the breadcrumb of where we've been.

(Apologies for the awkward title ... I'm open to suggestions :))

Answer 1

I've heard this called a "turn of the event loop" (by engineers at Mozilla and by members of TC39, the ECMAScript standard committee).

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In the ECMAScript standard, a Job is defined as "an abstract operation that initiates an ECMAScript computation when no other ECMAScript computation is currently in progress". That's exactly what you're looking for, but the term isn't widely used.

The HTML standard describes event loops in bewildering detail, but the term it uses, task, isn't widely used either.

Answer 2

I don't think there is a well-established, standard term for what you're asking about.

I've just heard it as "back to the event loop" or "finish the current thread of execution and return to the event loop".

And, node.js uses the term "next tick" to mean something similar.

Javascript (in both a browser and in node.js) is event driven and all asynchronous operations or user events get executed by putting an event in the event queue and that event gets processed only when the current thread of execution is done and the JS engine can then pull the next event off the event queue and start its execution. So, because the underlying mechanism is an event queue driven it is common to use the phrase "event" in whatever term you use to describe it.

This article on Understanding process.nextTick() refers to "every tick of the event loop".

You can imagine this event loop to be a queue of callbacks that are processed by Node on every tick of the event loop.

The node.js documentation for process.nextTick() uses "event loop turn runs to completion".

Once the current event loop turn runs to completion, call the callback function.

The node.js documentation for setImmediate() refers to "event loop iteration".

Callbacks for immediates are queued in the order in which they were created. The entire callback queue is processed every event loop iteration. If you queue an immediate from inside an executing callback, that immediate won't fire until the next event loop iteration.