The harmful decisions Rust made highlight its ingrained culture of doubling down on previous mistakes at all costs.
There seems to be no reevaluation of the cost/benefit ratio once the "preferred approach" turns out to be non-viable.
"We want to have feature X, consequences be damned" is rarely a winning move in language design.
Do you think "actually fixing" OS threads was a reasonable alternative? What would you prefer for a high performance abstraction instead of async?
I'd just wager that the effort of getting something like that into shape is smaller than the costs of async/await.
(And no, Rust's playing with green threads once 15 years ago and failing due to quality-of-implementation issues is not an excuse to dismiss everything that came after it off the bat.)
Though it's probably not worth discussing this whole topic with Rust fans currently:
Many made async/await part of their personality and have little experience to offer besides breathlessly pointing to one of the half dozen blog articles trying to defend async/await.
It will take a few years until that language feature runs through all stages of grief and one can have an adult discussion about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034778
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41004954
My body of work should be enough
This is a separate discussion, maybe you can put some of that body of work here.
I think this attitude is a major problem. You wrote something public and here you have lots of attention and engagement and you think you're being "generous" by replying to people. If you don't want people to read it, take it down. If you don't want to engage with people on hacker news, just ignore the whole thing. Calling comments "despicable" with no explanation is not a great reaction to people giving your article the attention you wanted in the first place.
(His older accounts show the same patterns of throwing childish tantrums and blowing up on random people.)
You weren't kidding. It's the exact same attitude of focusing on authority rather than explaining things technically.
Hacker News comments are divided between useful, inquisitive engagement, to which I react positively and smarmy, self-important bullshit, to which I react with scorn. You have made clear your allegiance to the latter. Sad!
If someone replies with insults and then just links to a google search page you wouldn't think they're some sort of authority because they promised you the evidence to their claim is out there somewhere.
If you want people to actually respect what you're saying you need to do things differently from both angles. Stop the toxic claims of authority and give simple explanations that are direct replies to what people are talking about.