This is a guest post from our contributor Ray Bellis, from Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.
Ray took care of migrating Etherpad code to async/await. His work landed on #3540, and will be part of next Etherpad release (1.8).

Etherpad is a popular collaborative real-time editing application. It is written to run within the NodeJS server-side JavaScript engine.

A lot of its code is quite old and written using coding paradigms that have since been replaced with much better alternatives. This resulted in a significant “technical debt” and a code base that is difficult to maintain and enhance.

At ISC we use Etherpad extensively. We wanted to add some functionality but found the code base very difficult to work with, and in particular the program’s flow of execution was difficult to analyse. I determined that the code could probably benefit from rewriting parts of it to take advantage of new language features.

With ISC’s support, I therefore recently spent a few weeks working on a significant refactoring of the Etherpad code, with that work described here.

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