The Evolution of Async Rust: From Tokio to High-Level Applications | The RustRover Blog

In a JetBrains livestream, Vitaly Bragilevsky and Carl Lerche, the creator of Tokio, discussed the evolution of asynchronous Rust, focusing on Tokio's role as the primary async runtime for high-performance networking. The conversation covered the architectural choices behind Tokio, the challenges developers face, and the future direction of the ecosystem. TokioConf, the first conference dedicated to the Tokio ecosystem, highlights its maturity and growth ten years after its inception. Async Rust goes beyond performance, offering improved event-driven system structuring through features like timeouts and cancellation management. The discussion also touched on the history and design decisions that led to Tokio's dominance, such as its adoption of proven scheduling patterns from languages like Go and Erlang, and the potential benefits and complexities of io_uring. Additionally, the challenges of cooperative scheduling and debugging in async Rust were addressed, as well as the potential for Rust to expand into higher-level web application frameworks with initiatives like Toasty, designed to improve productivity and ergonomics in data modeling and querying. The session closed by emphasizing Rust's established role in infrastructure-level systems and its potential growth into full-stack development.