ureq VS async-std

I also enjoyed using ureq as an http client.

After a quick check of the available rust http client libraries I opted for reqwest. It has a pretty simple API and it seems to be among the most used libraries for this matters. But I'm a bit concerned about all its dependencies so I might try ureq later.

Async is only useful when you have hundreds of connections open at the same time and idling most of the time; otherwise it's a liability. If your web API does not allow that (e.g. it has rate-limiting, which most APIs do), I suggest going with a client that performs blocking I/O and spawning threads if you need parallelism. https://github.com/algesten/ureq should fit the bill.

I think you'll find a lot of people claiming its overkill, but it will have excellent documentation for both sides, offer reasonable speed, and let you hash out the actual logic of your system without worrying too much about if your low-level implementation is correct. Two good frameworks for the server would be Actix or Rocket. For the client, i'd reccomend either using reqwest or ureq. From there, you can just set up a few POST endpoints, and get to going.

If you want an HTTP client with few dependencies and little unsafe code, take a look at https://github.com/algesten/ureq

Give ureq a try: https://github.com/algesten/ureq

But maybe check out the discussion here https://github.com/async-rs/async-std/pull/631 or something (the blog post was linked on the end of it)

Have a look at these: https://github.com/async-rs/async-std/tree/main/examples

In fact, there are a lot of crates in Rust where in other programming languages, it would be included in the standard library. Examples are regex, random number generators, additional iterator methods, macros for other collections, num traits, loggers, HTTP libraries, error handling, async runtimes, serialization and deserialization, date and time, and many more.

Two major projects (non std lib but extremely commonly used) stand out in the area of async programming: Async std and Tokio - no doubt familiar to anyone that has turned an eye towards Rust for a second too long. Async architecture in general is likely very familiar to JavaScript programmers but in Rust there are some extra considerations (like ownership of the data that is thrown into an async function). Tokio is fast becoming a heavily supported and road tested async framework, with a thread scheduling runtime "baked in" that has learned from the history of Go, Erlang, and Java thread schedulers.

Ah... https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio and https://github.com/async-rs/async-std ?

async-std: Basically a Tokio alternative with a few different design decisions.

Go's solution is for the scheduler to notice after a while when a goroutine has blocked execution and to shift goroutines waiting their turn to another thread. async-std pondered a similar approach with tasks, but it proved controversial and was never merged.

This indicates curl, zlib, openssl, and libnghttp2 as well as a bunch of WASM-related things are being dynamically linked into my executable. To resolve this, I looked at the build features exposed by surf and found that it selects the "curl_client" feature by default, which can be turned off and replaced with "h1-client-rustls" which uses an HTTP client backed by rustls and async-std and no dynamically linked libraries. Enabling this build feature removed all -sys dependencies from androidx-release-watcher, allowing me to build static executables of it.

And also, the actual PR never got merged.

Async in rust needs a runtime (aka executor) to run. You can maybe get a better description from the rust docs. As an example, Tokio attempts to provide an interface for a developer that is minimal change to the more common blocking code. So you'd end up putting #[tokio::main] above your main function to spin up the executor and most of the rest of the code is similar to a non-async version with a few sprinkles of .await, which you can see in the hello world for tokio. In contrast, async-std provides a more hands-on/low-level approach. If you are unlucky enough to have libraries that choose different stacks to work on, you'll possibly (probably?) have to handle both.