> Come to think of it, all of the times I've encountered it, there was no way to analyze the codepaths and prove that every exceptional situation and failure mode was handled.
There is nothing special about async/await with regards to this in Rust, at least if I'm understanding you correctly. Async functions can return Results like any other function for recoverable errors, and can panic like any other function for un-recoverable errors.
> My gut feeling is that async/await is functionally equivalent to the the synchronous/blocking/coroutine/channel system of other languages like Go.
It depends on what level of abstraction you're talking about. For Rust, which cares a lot about details, they're not. I gave a talk comparing and contrasting all this stuff here: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/rust-2019/
Well, I'm coming from the Javascript side, where people use promises a lot for async, but it's almost impossible to trace execution in the debugger. It's usually immediately obvious to me that many exceptions and failure modes have been missed, but I find it difficult to reason about large promise chains and I usually have no idea where I would add more error handling. It tends towards a big ball of spaghetti.
Then if something does fail (wifi blips out without a retry, who knows) the page just hangs with no indication of what went wrong.
Contrast this with Unix-style synchronous blocking code piping data between threads with no shared state. Since every step of execution happens in a single thread, blocking until a pipe returns data, it's trivial to step through the code.
Async/await really becomes a problem in Javascript though because they made it a language keyword in Node.js. So you never know if you are dealing with a sync function or async function. Eventually the entire program has async in front of everything and ends up being written just exactly like sync blocking (but with superfluous syntactic sugar everywhere). So I question what was really gained there. IMHO it just doubles the workload in the mind since now we have to juggle both types of functions and explore those permutations. That's the last thing we need when we're trying to brainstorm a solution from a large possible search space.
I'm also looking at this from a one-shot functional programming perspective. I realize that sync blocking code blocks the main thread, which is usually the GUI rendering loop. There are ways around that though. The best solution I've seen so far is Apple's Grand Central Dispatch:
Basically it works by being sync blocking and providing simple ways to run closures on other threads. I find it much easier to debug than async/await though. Rust probably already has all of that functionality, so I don't understand the advantage of copying Javascript model with all of its caveats. I think what's happening is that people just want to run with the context they're already familiar with.
Ah, so, async/await, while conceptually similar, isn't the same across languages. Rust's semantics here are very different than JS's. I think Rust's implementation would address all of your issues, at least conceptually.
> I don't understand the advantage of copying Javascript model with all of its caveats. I think what's happening is that people just want to run with the context they're already familiar with.
With respect, I think it's because you don't understand it in Rust yet. It was not directly copied from JS, and was certainly not due to familiarity. Read the post! It's very good :)
> Come to think of it, all of the times I've encountered it, there was no way to analyze the codepaths and prove that every exceptional situation and failure mode was handled.
There is nothing special about async/await with regards to this in Rust, at least if I'm understanding you correctly. Async functions can return Results like any other function for recoverable errors, and can panic like any other function for un-recoverable errors.
> My gut feeling is that async/await is functionally equivalent to the the synchronous/blocking/coroutine/channel system of other languages like Go.
It depends on what level of abstraction you're talking about. For Rust, which cares a lot about details, they're not. I gave a talk comparing and contrasting all this stuff here: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/rust-2019/