this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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Viral async?
I've done quite a bit of async programming and I can't quite figure out what people are complaining about here. Best I can tell, they just don't understand what async functions actually are.
Most of the time, async tutorial makes you learn tokio, not async. If your program can run with only tokio::main, then you learned async. If not, you learnt tokio (except if you are spawning a future that should never stop)
For example, my pet project only uses tokio::main to do async stuff. The only instances of tokio::spawn is make sure some SQLite transactions get polled to completion. I do need to replace them with a proper mechanism now that sqlx supports smol-rs
When people say "async is viral" in Rust, they mean that once you make one function
async, that change tends to ripple through the rest of your code. Any function that calls it usually has to becomeasyncas well so it canawaitthe result. In turn, the callers of those functions often need to becomeasynctoo.This propagation can continue all the way up the call stack until you reach your application's entry point. The main exception is when you introduce an explicit synchronous-to-asynchronous boundary, such as by using
block_on, which drives the future to completion without requiring the caller itself to beasync.Yeah but it's not really a problem with rust but how the language pattern is made. It's the same in JavaScript/typescript, and Python IIRC
It is Rust implementing the pattern. So... :P
along with most modern languages… it’s the way we deal with async when you don’t want callback hell. it’s just a complex problem domain
like… what… JITs are complex so that’s a problem for V8 specifically?