As a curious bystander, it will be interesting to see how the Zig async implementation pans out. They have the advantage of getting to see the pitfalls of those that have come before.

Getting back to Rust, even if not natural, I agree with the parent that the actor model is simply the better paradigm. Zero runtime allocation should still be possible, you just have to accept some constraints.

I think async looks simple because it looks like writing imperative code; unfortunately it is just obfuscating the complex reality underlying. The actor model makes things easier to reason about, even if it looks more complicated initially.