Comment by biorach

It's long been clear that there were fundamental implementation choices that mattered between async runtimes, but _nine_ design dimensions? Damn.

I think async is deceptive in that it seems like a self-contained and relatively straightforward aspect of a language. But there are many design choices to be made and they all have wide implications.

Plus I think the implications of many of these dimensions are not fully understood and that collectively we are still trying to understand how they are playing out in implementations. Add to this the subtle nature of some of the implications plus the combinations...

I think a good comparison is lexical vs dynamic scope in programming languages. This is a design dimension that was argued over for a decade or two in the early years of programming language design. It was only as time went by, and experience gained by working with concrete implementations that it became clear that lexical scoping should be the default choice and dynamic scoping should be restricted to various niches.