&gt; Why not X?<p>I wanted to use Rust and learn epoll through working with it directly.<p>&gt; I was hoping Rust wouldn&#x27;t head down this road.<p>To my knowledge, Rust does not have a std async story. I hope it will, and I believe libs like mio will help flush out platform agnostic ideas and a tested API.<p>&gt; To preempt: a systems language shouldn&#x27;t dictate these high-level matters<p>All of your cited example languages are _not_ systems language? Node.js isn&#x27;t even a language? It could be listed above with the rest of your async I&#x2F;O options across several languages.