You could have had the Loom experience 20 years ago by just spawning OS threads. Of course, there's a reason that this was discouraged... threads quickly turn into a nightmare to manage safely, especially when they need to interact.
Genuine question, how is managing cross interacting virtual threads any different or easier than managing interacting threads? I say this and I am greatly looking forward to using Loom in production. It's definitely the correct way to go as opposed to async/await.
It's not. That's the problem with the thread API that Loom is so dead set on preserving, and the big improvement that promises/async/await provide over threads.
Issue with os threads is that their number is limited. Not the issue with communication.
Futures are good enough for that, if you need more then structured concurrency.