If you remember the (gnu, ossp) pth library or any of the various cooperative multitasking equivalents for C, this is all the people raised on javascript, who s

If you remember the (gnu, ossp) pth library or any of the various cooperative multitasking equivalents for C, this is all the people raised on javascript, who started writing callback APIs for C#/ObjC discovering the same idea. await is equivalent to "yield" or "wait" in most of those systems. The idea is to pause execution and jump back to the cooperative scheduler, which will eventually execute the function call in question. Once that call ends up with a result, the scheduler will then (eventually) resume your function with the result at the point you yielded. In the midst of all that, various other threads of control will be scheduled briefly -- for instance, the ones servicing sockets and whatnot. It's all single threaded and cooperative -- typically with an event system embedded. Part of the callback "mess" is the result of the short memory of our industry. I was working with these kinds of systems in C code years and years ago. It didn't take long for most people to realize that you wanted to abstract the callbacks to the scheduler so you were writing your code instead fucking with the state machine mechanism used to implement the cooperative framework in question. No references to abstract CSP (or CPS :-)) ideas needed, really -- it's basic practical knowledge that seems to have been ignored over time.