90K views · Nov 11, 2019 · 48:46 · 5 HN recommenders · 5 mentions · discussed 2020–2026
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.
Why Hacker News points people here: 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.
“It will show you how meticulous the core team is and how long it took to arrive at this incredible, best in class design.”HN comment, 2020
“It will show you how meticulous the core team is and how long it took to arrive at this incredible, best in class design.”
How carefully the Rust team arrived at async/await.
Oh boy. The author of this post gave a speech about Rust’s journey to async/await: this 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.
“There are some great videos about it”
Rust async design and pinning explained.
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: this video link
“It was enlightening for me”
Covers what Rust tried before settling on async/await.
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 - this 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
“This video goes deep into that and the alternatives, and it changed my opinions a bit”
Deep dive on async/await and its alternatives.
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: this 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.
“Great preso on this”
Why Rust chose async/await over virtual threads.
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 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
