Assign value from successful promise resolve to external variable

You are going to get whatever then() returns. But since you are reading this, the following may help you:

Your statement does nothing more than ask the interpreter to assign the value returned from then() to the vm.feed variable. then() returns you a Promise (as you can see here: https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/ce77c25b067b7b74d90de23bfb4aac6a27abb9d1/src/ng/q.js#L288). You could picture this by seeing that the Promise (a simple object) is being pulled out of the function and getting assigned to vm.feed. This happens as soon as the interpreter executes that line.

Since your successful callback does not run when you call then() but only when your promise gets resolved (at a later time, asynchronously) it would be impossible for then() to return its value for the caller. This is the default way Javascript works. This was the exact reason Promises were introduced, so you could ask the interpreter to push the value to you, in the form of a callback.

Though on a future version that is being worked on for JavaScript (ES2016) a couple keywords will be introduced to work pretty much as you are expecting right now. The good news is you can start writing code like this today through transpilation from ES2016 to the current widely supported version (ES5).

A nice introduction to the topic is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lil4YCCXRYc

To use it right now you can transpile your code through Babel: https://babeljs.io/docs/usage/experimental/ (by running with --stage 1).

You can also see some examples here: https://github.com/lukehoban/ecmascript-asyncawait.

This could be updated to ES6 with arrow functions and look like:

getFeed().then(data => (vm.feed = data));

If you wish to use the async function, you could also do like that:

async function myFunction(){
    vm.feed = await getFeed();
    // do whatever you need with vm.feed below
 }

Edit: added parenthesis to be eslint correct (as commented by Max Waterman)

The then() method returns a Promise. It takes two arguments, both are callback functions for the success and failure cases of the Promise. the promise object itself doesn't give you the resolved data directly, the interface of this object only provides the data via callbacks supplied. So, you have to do this like this:

getFeed().then(function(data) { vm.feed = data;});

The then() function returns the promise with a resolved value of the previous then() callback, allowing you the pass the value to subsequent callbacks:

promiseB = promiseA.then(function(result) {
  return result + 1;
});

// promiseB will be resolved immediately after promiseA is resolved
// and its value will be the result of promiseA incremented by 1