What's awesome or rewarding about it?

It forces programmers to learn completely different ways of doing things, makes the code harder to understand and reason about, purely in order to get better performance.

Which is exactly the wrong thing for language designers to do. Their goal should be to find better ways to get those performance gains.

And the designers of Go and Java did just that.

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swiftcoder 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> It forces programmers to learn completely different ways of doing things, makes the code harder to understand and reason about, purely in order to get better performance.

Technically, promises/futures already did that in all of the mentioned languages. Async/await helped make it more user friendly, but the complexity was already there long before async/await arrived

	▲	brazzy 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes - I was really talking about "asynchronous programming" in general, not the async/await ways to do it in particular.

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tcfhgj 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What different way of doing things?

If I want sequential execution, I just call functions like in the synchronous case and append .await. If I want parallel and/or concurrent execution, I spawn futures instead of threads and .await them. If I want to use locks across await points, I use async locks, anything else?