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Rust's Journey to Async/Await

InfoQ5 HN recommenders · 2020–2026
90K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2019-11-11

Steve Klabnik walks through the history of Rust and how its design evolved toward async/await, including the alternatives tried and dropped. He also discusses the difficulty of adding a major feature to a language.

HN points to it to show how deliberately the Rust team arrived at async/await and why it was chosen over alternatives like green threads.

C, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesProgramming language design

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5 comments from Hacker News

@xiphias22020 · in “I can't keep up with idiomatic Rust”

I was referring to the fact that it is the only async implementation that I know of that compiles to a state machine that doesn't need to allocate new memory for each continuation. I think it will translate to extremely fast web services in practice. Pinning is of course part of the elegant solution. There are some great videos about it: [VIDEO] [LINK]

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@iknowstuff2020 · in “How often does Rust change?”

Oh boy. The author of this post gave a speech about Rust’s journey to async/await: [VIDEO] I highly recommend you skim it. It will show you how meticulous the core team is and how long it took to arrive at this incredible, best in class design.

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@dwoot2020 · in “Tokio 1.0 – async runtime for Rust”

I believe these are the talks from Steve that he's referring to. It was enlightening for me: 1. Rust's Journey to Async/Await - [VIDEO] 2. The Talk You've been Await-ing for - [LINK] The first video goes into all the bits you're concerned about and all the things that Rust has tried before arriving where they are now

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@frollogaston2025 · in “Leaving Google”

As you probably know, Rust ended up with async/await. This video goes deep into that and the alternatives, and it changed my opinions a bit: [VIDEO] Golang differs from Rust by having a runtime underneath. If you're already paying for that, it's probably better to do greenthreading than async/await, which is what Go did. I still find the Go syntax for this more bothersome and error-prone, as you said, but there are other solutions to that.

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@traderj0e2026 · in “The limits of Rust, or why you should probably not follow Amazon and Cloudflare”

Java is different. Tomcat's thread pool is the older way. A lot of newer stuff was using something promises-related instead with an event loop. But then recently Java added virtual threads which should obviate the need for that, similar to Go. Rust considered virtual threads but chose against that because it requires a more abstracted runtime like Java and Go have. Great preso on this [VIDEO] All the "async" stuff is super poorly named. They mean cooperative multitasking, or I guess "async within a single kernel thread." Yeah multiple kernel threads are asynchronous but "async" doesn't mean that :S

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