Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work

In 2017, I said that “asynchronous Rust programming is a disaster and a mess”. In 2021 a lot more of the Rust ecosystem has become asynchronous – such that it might be appropriate to just say that Rust programming is now a disaster and a mess. As someone who used to really love Rust, this makes me quite sad.

I’ve had a think about this, and I’m going to attempt to explain how we got here. Many people have explained the problems with asynchronous programming – the famous what colour is your function essay, for example.1 However, I think there are a number of things specific to the design of Rust that make asynchronous Rust particularly messy, on top of the problems inherent to doing any sort of asynchronous programming.

In particular, I actually think the design of Rust is almost fundamentally incompatible with a lot of asynchronous paradigms. It’s not that the people designing async were incompetent or bad at their jobs – they actually did a surprisingly good job given the circumstances! 2 I just don’t think it was ever going to work out cleanly – and to see why, you’re going to have to read a somewhat long blog post!..

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