> Is async in Rust really this bad?

No, it's not. It works. Perfect? No, absolutely not. There is plenty you could improve, plenty of rough edges you could smooth out. Stuff that caused us problems at the job I had writing low-ish level machine control services. But it's totally workable and we were able to ship working devices, especially compared to doing async stuff in other most other languages, especially the memory-unmanaged ones.

Kind of like Rust itself, a ton of people have tried it and bounced off it because they couldn't get it working in 10 minutes, and in doing so have declared it impossible/for geniuses only/broken/ecosystem-destroying. The narrative around async Rust is probably 70% meme/bad PR, 30% real, actual issues that could be improved.

I hope this comes off as fair. I don't want to excuse any of the shortcomings, but it's a working, useful tool.

Funny... I started off with very little knowledge, totally cheated with what I wanted to do by cloning everything crossing various library boundaries and it still worked surprisingly well. Then I learned about (A)RC, Box etc... and I still kinda really hate the lifetime syntax.

Note: most of what I've used it for has been relatively simple... API's with tokio and axum in rust are emphatically not much more difficult than say C# with FastEndpoints, or JS/TS with Hono. It's a bit different.