Next Day Edit: Sorry. Forgot to use my Canadian Aboriginal syllabics again. Because apparently it’s too hard to admit HTML-sanitizing source markdown was wrong!

One thing that irks me in these articles is gauging the opinion of the “Rust community” through Reddit/HN/Lemmy😉/blogs… etc. I don’t think I’d be way off the mark when I say that these platforms mostly collectively reflect the thoughts of junior Rustaceans, or non-Rustaceans experimenting with Rust, with the latter being the loudest, especially if they are struggling with it!

And I disagree with the argument that poor standard library support is the major issue, although I myself had that thought before. It’s definitely current lack of language features that do introduce some annoyances. I do agree however that implicit coloring is not the answer (or an answer I want to ever see).

Take this simple code I was writing today. Ideally, I would have liked to write it in functional style:

    async fn some_fn(＆self) -> OptionᐸMyResᐸVecᐸu8ᐳᐳᐳ {
        (bool_cond).then(|| async {
            // ...
            // res_op1().await?;
            // res_op2().await?;
            // ...
            Ok(bytes)
        })
    }

But this of course doesn’t work because of the opaque type of the async block. Is that a serious hurdle? Obviously, it’s not:

    async fn some_fn(＆self) -> OptionᐸMyResᐸVecᐸu8ᐳᐳᐳ {
        if !bool_cond {
            return None;
        }

        let res = || async {
            // ...
            // res_op1()?;
            // res_op2()?;
            // ...
            Ok(bytes)
        };

        Some(res().await)
    }

And done. A productive Rustacean is hardly wasting time on this.

Okay, bool::then() is not the best example. I’m just show-casing that it’s current language limitations, not stdlib ones, that are behind the odd async annoyance encountered. And the solution, I would argue, does not have to come in the form of implicit coloring.

I’ve had just this case. Wanted to use a particular crate that uses async and it’s forcing me to do lots of async things I’m unfamiliar with. I resent it a little, especially for a program that I’m fairly sure will not require concurrency of this sort.

At the same time, maybe I’ll get used to async rust if I use it enough. But so far I’m not having a lot of fun with it.