Problems

The following sections break out the biggest problems that we see. These problems are grouped into categories, but they also show up in the various narratives.

CategoryProblem
Too many ways to do it
Have to make complex choices up front
Libraries are locked to particular runtimes
Combining runtimes can lead to panics or poor performance
No standard read, write trait
No standard async iteration trait
No standard way to spawn tasks
No standard way to spawn blocking tasks
No standard way to get timers
No standard way to access files, network sockets
Scattered or missing documentation
Footguns
Unexpected cancellation
Nested awaits
Async-sync-async sandwich
Complexity cliff for low-level APIs
Missing language features
Async fn in traits
Async closures
Async destructors
Async main
Async tests
Generators
Missing capabilities
Ability to guarantee destructors or progress
Ability to spawn tasks that access borrowed data
Ability to be generic over thread-safety
Ability to easily support io-uring/DMA/zero-copy/bringing to C++
Poor tooling support
Complex stacktraces
Inconsistent IDE support
Debuggers, profilers operate at wrong level of abstraction
Hard to debug stuck tasks or other runtime failures
Async runtimes don't offer runtime metrics
Writing tests is hard
No standard or easy way to mock network access
No way to test concurrent schedules