I recently completed making an asynchronous version for all the functions in a pure C API, wrapped with N-API to work with JS/TS as a nodejs addon.
The last problem I had to fix was making sure that C POSIX-style errors (ie, returned integer codes) were transferred correctly to the JS at the end of a worker's execution (with the corresponding string, for which we have both an enum of exceptions, and a list of error messages).
When thrown with napi_throw_error (as I did for the synchronous version of all our calls), within the napi_async_complete_callback, these exceptions were never caught at the JS level (I suppose it was because it was within a different async context; I saw online people having a similar problem with ajax). Instead, I opted to just construct my errors as napi_value types, and return these via napi_reject_deferred. This seemed to have the desired effect, of being caught properly when doing a try { await My_NapiWrapper_XYZ() } catch (ex) { ... }.
So I don't really have a problem to fix, but I AM intrigued. These napi_throw_error thrown errors do probably go somewhere. Though I have no idea where. Where should one look to catch an error thrown with napi_throw_error from a napi_async_complete_callback ? Can you give a code example ?
No, they don't go anywhere. It is a bug that I just opened with them:
https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/41377
There is a general problem with handling exceptions in asynchronous callbacks. Normally, they cannot be catched and should lead to program termination but Node's developers have decided to try to keep it running when they can.