LIFO and FIFO compared
| Question | Stack · LIFO | Queue · FIFO |
|---|---|---|
| What runs next? | The newest pending item. | The oldest pending item. |
| What gets priority? | Recent context and interruption. | Arrival order and fairness. |
| Natural metaphor | Papers placed on top of a desk pile. | People joining the back of a line. |
| Good fit | Refreshes, overrides, nested work, urgent state. | Logs, jobs, transactions, ordered ingestion. |
| Starvation risk | Older work can wait while new work keeps arriving. | Urgent new work waits behind the backlog. |
Choose a stack when recency is meaningful
- A fresh UI state makes an older render request less useful.
- A task discovers nested prerequisite work that should happen immediately.
- A reconnection or resource-open event should release the newest pending request first.
- Users can supersede older intent with a newer action.
Choose a queue when every item deserves arrival-order processing or when older work must not be starved.
Reason from the visible array
easy-stack exposes pending tasks bottom first and newest last. That matches JavaScript's ordinary push() and pop() model:
stack.autoRun = false;
stack.add(first, second, newest);
console.log(stack.stack);
// [first, second, newest]
stack.next();
// newest executes
Protect old work when it matters.
Next pageVersion benchmarks
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If uninterrupted arrival order is a requirement, use a queue. Do not simulate FIFO by constantly reversing easy-stack's live array.