How to think about async/await in Rust
Not specific to rust, but I think asynchronous programming in general is a hype.<p>It didn&#x27;t start because it is so awesome, it started because JS can&#x27;t do parallel any other way. That&#x27;s the long and short of it. People wanted to use JS in the backend for some reason. The backend requires concurrency. JS cannot do concurrency. Enter the event loop. Then enter some syntactic sugar for the event loop. And since JS is popular, async became popular.<p>Code written using threads is, at least to me, much more readable and easier to reason about. Each section in itself is just synchronous code. The runtime&#x2F;kernel take care of concurrency. The overhead is negligible in a day when we have greenlet implementations. It works for both i&#x2F;o bound concurrency and cpu bound parallel computing. It doesn&#x27;t require entire libraries rewritten to support it. There is no callback hell. It scales both horizontically and vertically. Modern languages support it out of the box (Hello `go` keyword).<p>I realise that this is going to get a lot of downvotes. I don&#x27;t really care. To me, async is just &quot;cooperative multitasking&quot; with a quick paintjob. We left behind that paradigm in Operating Systems decades ago, and with good reason.