I'm sick of people perpetuating this about the Rust ecosystem. It's not a month that goes by that there isn't some article badmouthing the language and its features.
Stop it.
We want our language to gain support in enterprise so we can get paid to write it as our day job. These articles and negative comments are not helping.
This article is by a Rust contributor. I'm sure they want to see Rust be more widely adopted as well. Async is pretty great, but it's not perfect, and in some situations its shortcomings cannot be worked around easily.
I think the comment this person was responding to is completely off topic for my blog post, and extremely shallow. I share the person you're responding to's frustration with how async Rust is talked about on Hacker News.
I also agree with echelon, and I've been working with async rust daily for two and a half years. It was a bit painful before tokio 1.0, but by and large it's consistently great to work with, especially now. My only complaints remain having to restructure closure-based code into loops and occasional weird lifetime issues caused by the `#[async_trait]` macro, but hopefully the latter will go away with stabilization of `async_trait`.
The amount of "async rust is impossible to use," "async rust is fundamentally broken," etc. commentary that comes up on HN is absurd. I have trouble squaring my own experience with it, and it makes me think people are either complaining just to complain or that they haven't worked with it in anything other than toy contexts. I have a hard time imagining how difficult it would be to maintain our ~100k line rust codebase (http proxy that processes requests & responses, makes DB queries, and makes http requests to other services) and keep any kind of predictable performance by spawning threads, using channels, etc.
Like, not trying to be elitist, but I feel like people are missing the benefits for the sake of piling on or something.
It sounds like you are saying "I like Rust and want to be able to write it professionally, so shut up and stop criticizing it, regardless of how valid your criticism is".
Choosing a technology because it’s what you want to work in is never proper engineering for non-college projects. Choose the best technology to…you know…create a quality product for your customer. You can get paid that way too.
Your comments boil down to "I think rust is easy, stop giving your opinions that don't agree".
You didn't make any arguments here at all. You can check my other comment for detailed reasons why async in a language is not a good approach to concurrency. The overview is that is just isn't a holistic solution and the only time it will solve someone's problem is if they have extremely simple concurrency needs in the first place and those never scale or change.
The way I see their comment, and they'll have to forgive me if I'm wrong, is that the "async is bad" posts are generally not great.
a) They often focus on problems that, at least for me (and many others) are not significant. For example, acting like writing "+ Send + Sync + 'static" is causing your hands to seize in pain. Or they ignore that you can "block_on" a future.
b) They're then often interpreted by people who have very little context on async or rust at all. Look at the initial comment of "Async is a wart", it's idiotic. Look at how stupid the comments section is, how people are not talking about literally anything that boats wrote.
c) They make propositions that aren't very helpful. They mostly say "it was a mistake!" or "we don't need multithreading" or "we want TPC".
Contrast with Boats' post, which is far more contextual, far more historical, and proposes actual solutions and future work to be done.
It's quite frustrating to see the same sorts of complaints over and over again, especially when they're often not super great complaints to begin with.
I'm sick of people perpetuating this about the Rust ecosystem. It's not a month that goes by that there isn't some article badmouthing the language and its features.
Stop it.
We want our language to gain support in enterprise so we can get paid to write it as our day job. These articles and negative comments are not helping.