Rust Async Lately

Recent pontifications on Async Rust:

• Thesis: Matt Kline: Async Rust Is A Bad Language
• Antithesis: John Nunley: Why you might actually want async in your project
• Synthesis: Matthias Endler: The State of Async Rust: Runtimes

I.e., vibrant engagement, progress, and things are very much not yet done and settled. Rust-the-language is async, or maybe async-compatible, but a big chunk of async functionality comes from external crates and those aren't done cooking yet.

Between these two observations:

• It's currently quite painful to be indifferent/abstract/portable across async runtimes
• There isn't a single async runtime we can all agree on (tokio is nearest, but isn't this)

for now it seems best to avoid async rust unless it's absolutely necessary to your use case. This is especially important for library authors who would do well to avoid allowing details about specific async runtimes—or use of async at all—to leak into their APIs, lest they later find themselves needing to deprecate or awkwardly support today's transient async idioms.

These exchanges were quite helpful to me; thank you, Kline, Nunley, and Endler! A thing I'm working on at first seemed equally approachable with async and CSP, but from these exchanges I conclude that Rust is currently ready for async experimentation and ready for async in critical use cases, but not yet ready for casual async in libraries, so I'll be sticking with threads and channels for now.