smol VS wg-async

My understanding is you always need a runtime, somethings needs to drive the async flow. But there are others on the market, just not without the.. market domination... of tokio.

https://github.com/smol-rs/smol looks promising simply for being minimal

https://github.com/bytedance/monoio looks potentially easier to work with than tokio

https://github.com/DataDog/glommio is built around linux io_uring and seems somewhat promising for performance reasons.

I haven't played with any of these yet, because Tokio is unfortunately the path of least resistance. And a bit viral in how it's infected tings.

There is also https://github.com/smol-rs/smol which has components which you can compose into your own executor if you still need async IO but your usage patterns don't fit into the general purpose ones that Tokio provides.

If you need precise control over scheduling, consider building something on top of https://github.com/smol-rs/smol

Tokio is a "take what you need" framework, whilst Async-std started as an "everything the box" solution. Today both have a lot of crossover with micro async runtimes like smol becoming the foundation one of framework and optionally usable in the other. The ability to rip out a small dependent sub-crate (dependent package) like smol and use it independently with ease never get's boring, by the way. It's great way to include a test runtime in an async library without forcing the inclusion of a giant async framework.

Helix uses tokio. smol might be a good alternative however.

No, still active on GitHub. What gave you that idea? https://github.com/smol-rs/smol

Found the issue in Google cache. I'm not sure it's really fair of me to post this link here, but equally I think it's better to give the actual text rather than leave it vague.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PRjMyv...

I believe the solution mentioned in rust-lang/wg-async is the way to go: Add traits like AsyncWrite, AsyncRead, Executor/Runtime to the std so that tokio/async-std can implement them.

This is a consequence of runtimes relying on global variables that their core future types are dependent on. Creating abstractions to solve this problem is one of the main goals of the the async working group [0].

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/wg-async

Provided the futures you're selecting over are cancellation safe the plain loop over select! should be fine. Multiple channels in particular are safe to select over - if you have futures that aren't cancellation safe, you can just wrap them up in a task on the end of a channel and then select on that.

I'd like to be able to write runtime agnostic async libs.

You might be interested in taking a look at and potentially participating in the "Async Vision Document"[1] which is an exercise the team is going through to collect feedback about the current state of the ecosystem and what the pain points are, as well as a way to lay doing what the desired future state of async Rust should be[2]. The process is happening, as you would expect, in the open and there's still time to influence it[3] if your concerns aren't yet addressed or even mentioned[4].

[1]: https://rust-lang.github.io/wg-async-foundations/vision.html

[2]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2021/03/18/async-vision-doc.html

[3]: https://github.com/rust-lang/wg-async-foundations/pulls

[4]: https://github.com/rust-lang/wg-async-foundations/issues

Thanks for the feedback. I posted this comment to a relevant github issue, fyi.