[niftich]

I think the author's quote is a bit of an overstatement. Reading the docs on tokio_core seems that knowledge could be readily transferred if you've worked with Node, or browser JS, Java Futures, or a game engine -- this, of course, means you've been exposed to similar abstractions, potentially with different terminology.

I think the quote is to be interpreted in terms of, if you've only ever seen blocking IO, and have never seen async IO or deferred computation, you have to learn some things first, but this isn't unique to Tokio in particular.

[Yoric]

Actually, Tokio's futures are a bit different from the async IO (including most implementations of futures) in ecosystems. Nothing world-breaking, but they have shaped the abstraction a bit differently in order to be more efficient with respect to memory management, so it can be a bit surprising.