> But that's the thing, idiomatic Rust sync code almost never passes around handles, even when they need to do I/O.

Because they don't use async inside.

Zig code is passing around handles in code without io?

> Because they don't use async inside.

But they use I/O inside, and we arrive at this issue:

I'm writing async, and I need to call std::fs::read. I can't, because it blocks the thread; I could use spawn_blocking but that defeats the purpose of async. So instead I have to go look for a similar function but of the other color, probably from tokio.

In Zig, if you're writing sync, you call the standard library function for reading files. If you're writing async, you call the same library function for reading files. Then, the creator of the `io` object decides whether the whole thing will be sync or async.