Rust Async

Four years ago today, the Rust async/await feature was released in version 1.39.0. The announcement post says that “this work has been a long time in development – the key ideas for zero-cost futures, for example, were first proposed by Aaron Turon and Alex Crichton in 2016”. It’s now been longer since the release of async/await than the time between the first design work that underlies async/await. Despite this, and despite the fact that async/await syntax was explicitly shipped as a “minimum viable product,” the Rust project has shipped almost no extensions to async/await in the four years since the MVP was released.