Everything about async

It happened when I least expected it.

Someone, somewhere (above me, presumably) made a decision. "From now on", they declared, "all our new stuff must be written in Rust".

Up until recently, hyper was my favorite Rust HTTP framework. It's low-level, but that gives you a lot of control over what happens.

So! Rust futures! Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Until it's not. So let's do the easy thing, and then instead of waiting for the hard thing to sneak up on us, we'll go for it intentionally.

I'd like to think that my understanding of "async Rust" has increased over the past year or so. I'm 100% onboard with the basic principle: I would like to handle thousands of concurrent tasks using a handful of threads. That sounds great!

I used to be afraid of async Rust. It's easy to get into trouble!

But thanks to the work done by the whole community, async Rust is getting easier to use every week. One project I think is doing particularly great work in this area is async-std.

I started experimenting with asynchronous Rust code back when futures 0.1 was all we had - before async/await. I was a Rust baby then (I'm at least a toddler now), so I quickly drowned in a sea of .and_then, .map_err and Either<A, B>.