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PATA vs. SATA is a somewhat limited metaphor; PATA had a number of limitations such as the inability to hot swap hardware as well as using wide ribbon cables that made it largely obsolete. In contrast, both sync and async programming have reasonable applications; we're likely using both for the foreseeable future. The best EE analogy I can think of is using hyperthreading to execute multiple processes on a single core vs scheduling each thread to a separate core, but that's less a metaphor and more of a simplified model of what async vs sync is actually doing.

> Should we move back away from parallelism and focus on handling synchronous stuff faster instead?

Rust already has excellent handling of synchronous computation, given that it can meet/sometimes exceed equivalent performance in C. The problem is when you're I/O or network bound; you can either throw threads at the problem (and by extension throw memory at the problem for the thread stacks) or use async programming.