You may find StratifiedJS pleasing: http://onilabs.com/stratifiedjs http://onilabs.com/stratifiedjs You wouldn't even need that one callback, just: return fin

You may find StratifiedJS pleasing: http://onilabs.com/stratifiedjs http://onilabs.com/stratifiedjs You wouldn't even need that one callback, just: return find_largest(get_stats(read_files(dir))); Exceptions are propagated as you would expect from synchronous code, despite being async under the hood.