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by josephg 635 days ago
Author here. I think async is a great feature to have - but I can't help but wonder if you're right. It might just be case of timing, but it seemed like once async was in the works, work on the rest of the language ceased. For awhile there all energy was poured into bikeshedding over how async would work. And I don't know if anyone is super happy with the result. Pin is a mess. Async functions still return anonymous objects - which cause all sorts of problems. And there still aren't coroutines in the language, even though async functions are implemented internally using coroutines anyway.

If we could go back in time and have the rust project decide to never implement async, I wonder what rust would look like today. There's a good chance the language & compiler would be much nicer as a result.
2 comments
mwcampbell 634 days ago
> If we could go back in time and have the rust project decide to never implement async, I wonder what rust would look like today.

If withoutboats is right [1], then Rust would never have received the industry backing to be as successful as it is now.

[1]: https://without.boats/blog/why-async-rust/ especially the section "Organizational considerations"

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josephg 634 days ago
"Pleasing to corporate sponsors" isn't what comes to mind when I think about great programming languages.
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mwcampbell 634 days ago
But it probably is a prerequisite for any project achieving its mission on a large scale. I'd rather have a programming language that makes a big positive impact in the security, reliability, and efficiency of software that lots of people use, than one that's aesthetically pleasing but not widely used.
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simon_o 634 days ago
It's not an either or.

We have hundreds of languages made to please the corporate overlords.

Can't we just have one language that's actually nice to use?

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josephg 634 days ago
C and C++ were never sponsored by large companies, and they did just fine. Zig is the same, today. (It has some small sponsors, but nothing like the corporate support of rust.)
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jasode 634 days ago
>C and C++ were never sponsored by large companies,

I don't know what you had in mind for "sponsored" but others would disagree and say both C and C++ were "sponsored by AT&T Bell Labs" because the people who created them (Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup) were employees of AT&T. Analogous to Rob Pike, et al. of Go Language being employed/sponsored at Google.

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simon_o 634 days ago
I think Rust's `async` has been a great success for commercial "sponsors" of Rust, because it increased the complexity of the language so much that it's hardly possible anymore to contribute to it without being full-time employed to do so.

The decision for `async` handed a lot of power to Amazon et al.

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