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by estebank 1470 days ago
> There is no sane way to make async optional in a library and reuse code.

FWIW, there's an effort to do exactly that, but because it will require language level changes and it is just on the drawing board phase, it will likely be a while before it can be widely used.

The "optionality" of `async` while sharing code also applies for `const` and mutability (why do we need `Deref` and `DerefMut`?). Finding a solution that can work for these three (and maybe others?) parts of the language will be a welcome improvement.
2 comments
api 1470 days ago
Great to hear! That's really the solution.

Rust async code can be a bit challenging until you get it, but I can't think of a way to make it that much simpler without sacrificing the whole "systems programming language" concept or support for embedded. The only good alternative is Go-like fibers and that requires a fat runtime.

We use both Rust and Go at ZeroTier and find that they both have their own niches. (We are slowly moving ZeroTier from C++ to Rust to use a more modern and more importantly safe language.)

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mikevm 1470 days ago
Where do you use Go?
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api 1470 days ago
Backend to my.zerotier.com and internal analytics code.
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mikevm 1469 days ago
Do you think that was the right choice, or would you have written that in Rust if you were starting today?
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api 1469 days ago
Go is great for backend stuff like that. If we rewrote it from scratch today we might consider Rust though just to have only one language in the house... but Go is really good for that case.

We are using Rust for the ZeroTier network hypervisor and core system service though because that's systems-level software that is performance-critical, needs to fit on small-ish devices, and needs deterministic performance among other things.

They're really different languages for different niches. Rust is C++ 2.0. Go is fast compiled Python with a cleaner design. (Python is the best niche comparison I've found for Go.)

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mikevm 1469 days ago
Very interesting! Thanks for the answers! :)
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cercatrova 1469 days ago
> FWIW, there's an effort to do exactly that

Could you link where?

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estebank 1469 days ago
https://hackmd.io/Aw2L3VmPQsm0ANC_XMughQ
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