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Rust's Journey to Async/Await

InfoQ · talk · Watch on YouTube

C, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesProgramming language design

What it is

Steve Klabnik walks through the history of Rust and how its design evolved toward async/await, including the alternatives tried and dropped. He also discusses the difficulty of adding a major feature to a language.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN points to it to show how deliberately the Rust team arrived at async/await and why it was chosen over alternatives like green threads.

  • 5 people recommended it
  • 4 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2020, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “It will show you how meticulous the core team is and how long it took to arrive at this incredible, best in class design.”

    How carefully the Rust team arrived at async/await.

    iknowstuff, 2020-04 · Strong recommendation · in “How often does Rust change?”

  2. “There are some great videos about it”

    Rust async design and pinning explained.

    xiphias2, 2020-04 · Recommendation · in “I can't keep up with idiomatic Rust”

  3. “It was enlightening for me”

    Covers what Rust tried before settling on async/await.

    dwoot, 2020-12 · Recommendation · in “Tokio 1.0 – async runtime for Rust”

  4. “This video goes deep into that and the alternatives, and it changed my opinions a bit”

    Deep dive on async/await and its alternatives.

    frollogaston, 2025-05 · Recommendation · in “Leaving Google”

  5. “Great preso on this”

    Why Rust chose async/await over virtual threads.

    traderj0e, 2026-05 · Recommendation · in “The limits of Rust, or why you should probably not follow Amazon and Cloudflare”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: rust, async, language design, futures, qcon

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