Can we all please stop complaining about async Rust and just acknowledge that the problem they were solving was both really hard and urgent for the success of the language (particularly given priorities among the most well-resourced tech companies in the late 2010s)? All things considered, I think they did a good job. I certainly wouldn't have done any better. And the feature was well thought through, with years of work before it shipped.
The problem is really hard. But I think bringing it up is useful, because it motivates people to think about how they would solve it better. It’s certainly a question I’ve asked myself a bunch of times.
If we all stopped complaining about memory safety in C and C++, we would never have gotten rust in the first place. Rob pike would never have let generics make it into Go if people didn’t spend years pestering him about it.
I think I fail by taking for granted all the work that’s gone into languages like rust. Lots of smart people have poured themselves into these discussions and designs. Thankyou. I don’t say that enough.
But yeah, async rust seems like one of those places where people arguing it out on github didn’t converge at a great design. It’s a really hard problem - really, combining a borrow checker with stack suspension is a CS research problem. I think it’s interesting and important to acknowledge that committees don’t always do great research. Sometimes you need a bunch of iterations of an idea. And a bright cookie or two who can work without justifying their designs.
So no, I don’t think I’ll stop talking about it. Making async rust v1 was an incredible amount of work and I’m very grateful. But I also really want to seed the idea space so some bright sparks can think about what async rust v2 might look like.
