I've been working with alpha futures, tokio, hyper, etc with async/await support on rust beta (didn't use async std yet) and can attest to them working quite well. There was quite a learning curve for me to know when to use arc, mutex, different stream combinators, and understand raw polling, but after I did, writing the code became a bit easier. I suggest anyone wanting to learn to grab a tcp-level networking project/idea/protocol and grind on it for days, heh.