That being said I can't shake the feeling that going for something like Tokio in such a case is a bit like healing a paper cut by amputating the arm. Sure, technically you don't have the original problem anymore...
So, I can relate to not wanting to pull in the dependency. But otherwise it seems pretty straightforward to me. You just macro-decorate the main function, sprinkle some async/await around, maybe add a join or a mutex somewhere, and then pretty much forget all about event loops, messaging, threads and whatnot. I feel like I must be missing something important here.
that is ... not how I have experienced it. I work on building highly concurrent systems every day but async drives me insane. to me the fundamental issue is that although the code now reads linearly, it no longer executes linearly (or reasonably close to linearly), which is 1000x more confusing.
the other thing, when I'm using rust to build something high performance, part of the reason is it provides greater control. I just can't square that with macro-decorating my main function, and handing over the core control-flow to someone else's runtime.
With async/await the apparent complexity gets reduced at the cost of vastly increased actual complexity. E.g., now instead of everything being your code that you can look at and reason about, all your concurrent workloads disappear in this void that promises to do the right thing with them. If it works the way you intended, great. If it doesn't, the rabbit hole can now be really deep.
And then, it's also a trust issue. Now you have to trust other people to have done a good job.
Ok, yes, this makes sense.
And the loss of control is also an issue for me. I write code for memory-constrained environments, with blocking code and OS threads I can usually bound my memory consumption fairly easily. If I surrender the control to a scheduler runtime I feel like it becomes a lot harder, although here I'm willing to concede that it might have more to do with my lack of experience with Tokio than an objective issue.
Maybe it is undesirable because that often times plain mono-thread synchronous is fast enough, easier to read, easier to debug and safe to handle to a junior ? Not everybody in a team has the same level of expertise.
And Rust is not an interpreted language. IMHO, interpreted languages should just drop to a compiled one to keep it KISS. Instead of going the async road, just to discover in production, it is unstable because back-pressure was not taken into account. And, in Rust, it is probably not worth the effort and ultimately bloat most of the time.
Shared-memory concurrency is pretty much always buggy, IME, even if your team thinks they're experts.
> And Rust is not an interpreted language. IMHO, interpreted languages should just drop to a compiled one to keep it KISS. Instead of going the async road, just to discover in production, it is unstable because back-pressure was not taken into account.
WTF? Switching to a compiled language doesn't magically make your threads nonblocking. Maybe you can serve 10x more users with a compiled language, but if we're talking about slow network requests then async can make your throughput thousands of times higher.
