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Example from the recent past: I wanted a quick Rust code to stream s3 object, uncompress with zstd and untar the content to a directory. aws-sdk-s3 supports onl

Example from the recent past: I wanted a quick Rust code to stream s3 object, uncompress with zstd and untar the content to a directory. aws-sdk-s3 supports only async (tokio), tar crate only blocking, async-tar only async-std, async-compression only tokio. Hard to paper over it with `block_on` because of the streaming part. I don't remember what I actually did, but it doesn't matter - having to come up with a magic working combination is exactly the pain. I just wish everything would at least still support blocking IO as a common denominator, so there's at least a baseline that is known to be possible. 99% of percent of the time I do not need benefits of async, because I write small software for relatively small, but still real use-cases. And using Rust ecosystem was easier just a few years ago than it is now for these use-cases, as blocking Rust was not yet relegated to be a second class citizen, replaced by an immature and fractured async.

insanitybit 3y ago
> And using Rust ecosystem was easier just a few years ago than it is now for these use-cases I used to write Rust web services (professionally) before async and it was definitely not easier for me. It was way harder. I'd end up with accidental hanging because some socket didn't have a timeout set on it properly, it was extremely leaky (why the hell am I talking to raw socket APIs just so that I can read from S3?), and it sucked compared to async. We've had radically different experiences, somehow.
- dpc_01234 3y ago
  > why the hell am I talking to raw socket APIs just so that I can read from S3 I don't know. https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/net/struct.TcpStream.html#method.set_read_timeout https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/net/struct.TcpStream.html#meth... etc. were there for a while. Though I think that deadline-based timeouts would be way better to have. https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/8b5krv/the_case_for_deadlines/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/8b5krv/the_case_for_d... . Probably could be built around existing primitives. These things were never built/popularized because the community just jumped on async like some silver bullet. I agree that building heavy duty networked services got easier with async, but at an expense of fracturing the ecosystem and dragging everything else into an MVP feature, which made things worse (at least in some respect) for other things. I personally don't do much web servers, and when I do I can just spawn lots of threads, terminate TLS with nginx anyway. Again, I don't mind async on its own. I think it's great for what it is, and is useful when it's useful. But for decades tons of the web was built in Java, Python, RoR without async IO and it worked just fine. And I didn't have to play IO-type sudoku, and could expect that the most basic, native blocking IO is well supported, and not just an afterthought/wrapper.

insanitybit 3y ago

> And using Rust ecosystem was easier just a few years ago than it is now for these use-cases I used to write Rust web services (professionally) before async and it was definitely not easier for me. It was way harder. I'd end up with accidental hanging because some socket didn't have a timeout set on it properly, it was extremely leaky (why the hell am I talking to raw socket APIs just so that I can read from S3?), and it sucked compared to async. We've had radically different experiences, somehow.

dpc_01234 3y ago
> why the hell am I talking to raw socket APIs just so that I can read from S3 I don't know. https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/net/struct.TcpStream.html#method.set_read_timeout https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/net/struct.TcpStream.html#meth... etc. were there for a while. Though I think that deadline-based timeouts would be way better to have. https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/8b5krv/the_case_for_deadlines/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/8b5krv/the_case_for_d... . Probably could be built around existing primitives. These things were never built/popularized because the community just jumped on async like some silver bullet. I agree that building heavy duty networked services got easier with async, but at an expense of fracturing the ecosystem and dragging everything else into an MVP feature, which made things worse (at least in some respect) for other things. I personally don't do much web servers, and when I do I can just spawn lots of threads, terminate TLS with nginx anyway. Again, I don't mind async on its own. I think it's great for what it is, and is useful when it's useful. But for decades tons of the web was built in Java, Python, RoR without async IO and it worked just fine. And I didn't have to play IO-type sudoku, and could expect that the most basic, native blocking IO is well supported, and not just an afterthought/wrapper.