As a fellow Rust learner-and-user, I felt lots of points in the article are spot on.
I recently wrote a custom HTTP framework in Rust and had spent 2 weeks to figure out how to store a collection of async closure so I can call any of them later. The idea / goal was very clear, but it was so hard for me to figure out how to implement it in the language.
Maybe I'm not smart enough for Rust, but I've already used Rust for more than 1 year, and still struggled to use it. I don't know if I should switch to a different language, e.g. Golang.
If you haven't worked with Go you should definitely do it, just to compare. It's hard to imagine two popular mainstream languages further apart in spirit than these two.
Go is so focused on simplicity that you'll be up and running (and have your server working) in like a day, tops. Then you can ponder the tradeoffs from a place of (some) knowledge not hypotheticals.
From what I've read, smol was created by its author and later on adopted by async-std. And, its author was in Tokio team, and later left and was in async-std team before he left and created smol. So smol was based on quite deep knowledge and experience in async.
Thanks for the pointer! It's really sad to hear this. I'm using smol in my project and really like it. I didn't know the author left until now. It's a great loss for Rust, in my opinion.
