Will it finally: a try/catch quiz

With the advent of async/await, I’ve recently found myself using a lot more try/catch/finally in my code. But honestly, I’m a little out of practice with finally. When I went to actually use it, I was a little unsure of its finer details. So I put together a few examples.

#When you throw a catch

Consider the case where you throw an exception within a catch block. There’s nothing to catch your throw before it exits the function. Does finally run?

To find out, just uncomment the example() call at the bottom of the editor!

function example() {
  try {
    fail()
  }
  catch (e) {
    console.log("Will finally run?")
    throw e
  }
  finally {
    console.log("FINALLY RUNS!")
  }
  console.log("This shouldn't be called eh?")
}

// example()

#Try without catch

Did you know that if you supply a finally block, you don’t need to supply a catch block too? You probably did, but it was worth asking!

So next question: does that finally block get called even if nothing goes wrong in the try block? If you’re not sure, uncomment the example() at the bottom of the editor to find out.

function example() {
  try {
    console.log("Hakuna matata")
  }
  finally {
    console.log("What a wonderful phrase!")
  }
}

// example()

function example() {
  try {
    console.log("I shall try and fail");
    fail();
  }
  catch (e) {
    console.log("Then be caught");
  }
  finally {
    console.log("And finally something?");
  }
}

// example()

#Return and finally

So finally lets you clean up after yourself when exceptions occur. But what about when nothing goes wrong and you just return from the function like normal… in a try block?

Take a look at the below example. Is it possible that the finally block within example() can run after you’ve already hit a return statement? Uncomment the example() at the bottom of the editor to find out!

function example() {
  try {
    console.log("I'm picking up my ball and going home.")
    return
  }
  finally {
    console.log('Finally?')
  }
}

// example()

#The Rule

The finally block on a try/catch/finally will always run — even if you bail early with an exception or a return.

This is what makes it so useful; it’s the perfect place to put code that needs to run regardless of what happens, like cleanup code for error-prone IO. In fact, that’s what inspired this article.

#I used finally for…

Frontend Armory is a statically rendered website; it’s built with a tool called Navi, which lets you configure a renderPageToString() function that will be used to render each page.

In order to make sure each call to renderPageToString() is independent of the previous one, Navi uses try/catch/finally and some obscure node-fu to unload any modules that are loaded during the rendering process.

let oldCacheKeys = new Set(Object.keys(require.cache))
try {
  html = await renderPageToString(options)
}
catch (e) {
  throw e
}
finally {
  process.env.NODE_ENV = nodeEnv

  for (let key of Object.keys(require.cache)) {
    if (!oldCacheKeys.has(key)) {
      delete require.cache[key]
    }
  }
}

As you can see from the above example, try/catch/finally also work great with JavaScript’s new async/await syntax. So if this has reminded you that you need to brush up on async/await, now’s the time to mosey on over to my Mastering Asynchronous JavaScript course!

But that’s it for today. Thanks so much for reading! If you have any questions or comments, shoot me a Tweet or DM at @james_k_nelson. And until next time, happy coding :-)