I sympathize. As I said in another comment, the issue isn't really caused by async, IMO. It's caused by the complicated and leaky abstraction of traits. I'd be

I sympathize. As I said in another comment, the issue isn't really caused by async, IMO. It's caused by the complicated and leaky abstraction of traits. I'd be willing to bet that your difficulties were more around dealing with the interactions of async + traits than if you had just written a bunch of async functions and then ran them inside an async main (via tokio's tokio::main attribute). Just a guess.