JavaScript Promises - reject vs. throw

There is no advantage of using one vs the other, but, there is a specific case where throw won't work. However, those cases can be fixed.

Any time you are inside of a promise callback, you can use throw. However, if you're in any other asynchronous callback, you must use reject.

For example, this won't trigger the catch:

new Promise(function() {
  setTimeout(function() {
    throw 'or nah';
    // return Promise.reject('or nah'); also won't work
  }, 1000);
}).catch(function(e) {
  console.log(e); // doesn't happen
});

Instead you're left with an unresolved promise and an uncaught exception. That is a case where you would want to instead use reject. However, you could fix this in two ways.

  1. by using the original Promise's reject function inside the timeout:

new Promise(function(resolve, reject) {
  setTimeout(function() {
    reject('or nah');
  }, 1000);
}).catch(function(e) {
  console.log(e); // works!
});
  1. by promisifying the timeout:

function timeout(duration) { // Thanks joews
  return new Promise(function(resolve) {
    setTimeout(resolve, duration);
  });
}

timeout(1000).then(function() {
  throw 'worky!';
  // return Promise.reject('worky'); also works
}).catch(function(e) {
  console.log(e); // 'worky!'
});

Another important fact is that reject() DOES NOT terminate control flow like a return statement does. In contrast throw does terminate control flow.

Example:

new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
  throw "err";
  console.log("NEVER REACHED");
})
.then(() => console.log("RESOLVED"))
.catch(() => console.log("REJECTED"));

vs

new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
  reject(); // resolve() behaves similarly
  console.log("ALWAYS REACHED"); // "REJECTED" will print AFTER this
})
.then(() => console.log("RESOLVED"))
.catch(() => console.log("REJECTED"));