How to make a actual sleep function in Javascript

Occasionally if you’d like to put execution in pause, in other languages, this is done with a function called sleep() (or wait()). In javascript, you might think that this can be done with setTimeout(), but you’d be wrong. This will only queue a task to be executed later while the main script still continues executing to completion.

It is possible to promisify the setTimeout in a way to make it act like a sleep function but that solution isn’t perfect.

Natively in js however, theres a really cool thing called atomics.wait() which can be used to implement a sleep function.

atomics.wait() by itself does not cause the script to pause execution, but instead this function is checking that the shared-array we pass it contains a value and if so waits for a specified duration.

To be a bit more precise, heres an excerpt from mdn:

The static Atomics.wait() method verifies that a given position in an Int32Array still contains a given value and if so sleeps, awaiting a wakeup or a timeout. It returns a string which is either “ok”, “not-equal”, or “timed-out”.
source: mdn

function sleep(ms:number){
  Atomics.wait(new Int32Array(new SharedArrayBuffer(4)),0 ,0, ms)
}

NB: if using js, remove :number, thats just a typescript type notation.