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Rust's Journey to Async/Await

InfoQ · 89.8K views · 2019-11-11 · 48:46

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2020–2026

Topics

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

What people said

iknowstuff · 2020-04 · Strong recommendation

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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traderj0e · 2026-05 · Recommendation

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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frollogaston · 2025-05 · Recommendation

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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Sources

Video by InfoQ, played through YouTube.

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