Comment by zaphar
1 year ago
It is increasingly harder to avoid async Rust if you do any form of IO. Most of the useful io based crates assume you are doing async with a very minor amount of them giving you a non async api. Out of the ones that do they are bundling an executor to power that api because they don't want to implement it twice.
I think part of what is feeding this sort of backlash against it is the way that it creates two different rust ecosystems. One of them, the non async version, being decidedly a second class citizen.
It looks like there's good movement on the proposal to bring pollster[1] or similar into the Rust standard library.
I think that's awesome. They've been afraid to "bless" an executor for good reasons, but pollster has 0 chance of "winning" even if blessed since it lacks so many features. However it's a solution to the problem you expressed: I/O crates can be async and used with pollster in sync contexts.
1: https://docs.rs/pollster/latest/pollster/
I haven't been following, would you have a link to this proposal ? A quick search of pollster in rust-lang/rust and rust-lang/rfcs does not bring any interesting result.
Good question. I might have been projecting my hopes to make it sound more formal, but the only thing I could find following my cookie crumbs was the mention in https://without.boats/blog/why-async-rust/