Sort of! I think this flexibility (the coat of many colors) is why Rust didn't implement the whole runtime, just Futures, and those futures are as minimal as th

Sort of! I think this flexibility (the coat of many colors) is why Rust didn't implement the whole runtime, just Futures, and those futures are as minimal as they can possibly be. The smallest possible executor for futures is really quite tiny, with no need for the complexity of tokio's work-stealing, multi-threaded scheduler and all that. So it leaves a lot of room for minimal executors like https://docs.rs/smol/latest/smol/ https://docs.rs/smol/latest/smol/, or for you to write your own, or even to build some kind of FFI to send futures across to C or C++ I do completely agree with you that it would be great for std to pull in more traits from `futures` and elsewhere to allow it to be easier to write code against different runtimes! I think part of the intent was to get Futures out, see how they get used, and then to go from there. Hopefully we're getting into the "go from there" stage now, which is some of what this article gets into