[circlespainter]

> I've been using Akka in combination with Scala's Futures, with Java 8's CompletableFutures, with Rx Observables, with in-house asynchronous queues and I can't see how Akka doesn't play nice.

Quasar doesn't introduce an async programming framework to work around threads inefficiencies, it simply gives you more efficient threads.

> You can do that [write REST endpoint] with Akka as well, I've done that, I don't see the problem there.

Without Quasar, for your services you can either use normal JAX-RS, which is based on Java's heavyweight threads, or Play (or Spray) which is non-standard and async. With Quasar instead you can use standard JAX-RS with regular blocking code, but running on lightweight threads.

> the bit about "synchronous" and "blocking" code being easier (while cheating by patching connections) is bullshit [...] People should write asynchronous code throughout the entire call-stack [...]

Probably I don't understand because I don't know much about Gevent and Eventlet but for info about Quasar I/O pls. refer to my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9585737. As for async being the way to go, I don't agree and the many discussions about async code problems tell me I'm not alone in that.