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Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

Great seeing this backstory. WithoutBoats has had some super active discussions around very topical async iterators, poll, and pin topics already! https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=without.boats

It feels like there's very few communities that people going so in depth publically about the nitty gritty of their language, and it's so cool to see.

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Its cool, but it also means the development of the language is very very slow. Async is still half backed and super complex, and I say that as a guy who has written rust code 40h/week for the past 3 years.

This isn't why development is slow. In my opinion, if I were still employed to work on Rust improvements to async would have shipped a lot faster. My blogging about it in my free time is my effort, in light of my circumstances, to get the project back to shipping on async.

It would help for sure to have a lead on this. Still there are a lot of opinions on the way forward for async so it would still be slow I think.

I did get annoyed recently by the trait async stabilization that promised us a good trait-variant [1] which has been abandoned. Makes it so much harder to build a library without it.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/impl-trait-utils

For someone not in the loop, why not go back into it and take the lead? At least on a part time, volunteer basis.

I fully agree. Sometimes it feels like so much effort is put into rust's async side that the rest of the language ends up taking a back seat and suffering for it.

Rust dev team cares too much about async and webdev imho. Yes I know the web is where 95% of programming jobs live now. But as a C++ systems programmer I simply could not care less about the web. Rust is a systems language trying to get its foot in the web door. I'd selfishly rather it focus on being a superior C/C++. Alas.

The usual complaint is that there has been little progress on async and webdev in Rust itself since 2018 so it's odd to hear the reverse complaint.

Though I would add that Rust's async is not just about webdev; it has had success in embedded contexts e.g. the popular https://github.com/embassy-rs/embassy?tab=readme-ov-file#emb...

The nature of open source is that people work on what they want to work on. People work on async because it interests them. But to the same level many people in the lang and libs team don't know async that well. You may perceive it that everyone works only on async but this is just not true.

Async is not for webdev only.

It feels like async is popular and necessary but just not that good fit for rust. Having it is better than not having it I suppose....

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