Async Rust Is A Bad Language

Async rust might suck, compared to async in higher level languages, but for someone comming from C, async rust simplifies a lot of stuff. It often feels like a lot of criticisms of rust boils down to the fact that rist was sold to both people using low and high level languages. I don't doubt that async rust is shit when all you want is a faster typescript.

Edit: I certainly also have my criticisms of rust and its async implementation, and I think some of the authors concerns are valid, it was just an observation about the tension between the needs of the two groups of users.

fn foo(＆big, ＆chungus)

is out,

async fn foo(＆BIG_GLOBAL_STATIC_REF_OR_SIMILAR_HORROR, sendable_chungus.clone())

is in.

Or maybe you know

fn foo(＆big, ＆chungus)

is out

async fn foo(big, chungus) -> (big, chungus)

is in

Or

async fn foo(big, chungus) {
  // ...
  tx.send((big, chungus)).await?;
  // ...
}

is in

Moving (movable/sendable) data is not limited by number or direction, you know. And that second one even makes use of them great Hoare channels! And gives us control on how long we hold on to data before sending it back (modified or not). But I digress. Let's go back to the important talking point that Hoare was right!

Interesting read but I don't agree that it's as bad as the author makes it sound. I'm also curious what an alternative would be, if you don't want a garbage collector?

In my personal experience, you don't run into all the Arc, Pin and 'static stuff that often. I would even say very rarely.

Maybe it's just me, but isn't async programming a mess in all programming languages?

It really is interesting how async Rust takes the shine off of Rust to such an extent. If good old stack based, single threaded Rust wasn’t so polished, I don’t think the async parts would stand out so much. Something that might help is to have some sort of benchmark showing that Arcing through an async problem is still faster than typical GCed languages.

Good read!