Async/Await

[olanod]

Perhaps worth designing those APIs to be async/await friendly from the beginning? Soon everything in the Rust world will be asynchronous and embedded won't be the exception.

[thejpster]

Yes, I'm very aware of what Ferrous have been up to. Would you like to propose an API?

[ryan-summers]

Just to add some bit to the discussion - I don't think it's safe to ever say:

Soon everything in the Rust world will be asynchronous and embedded won't be the exception.

I disagree. The article you link talks about this as well - async is really nice for cooperative multitasking, but it does not work well for hard real-time systems (e.g. safety critical) because there's no guarantee when other tasks will release their execution. There's always exceptions and specific use cases in software.

I definitely support adding async/await traits, but I don't think they should be the only possible API. Perhaps we can have an AsyncTcpStack as well as an AsyncUdpStack added that use async read/write functions. Then, drivers that make use of async/await can request the associated async stack.

[chrysn]

It should be noted in this issue that there is now an experimental crate embedded-nal-async that is being developed as part of this repository.

[edit: All my links and names had a line above the n of nal and accidentally looked like hal ... but the statement holds]

[ryan-summers]

In light of that, I'm going to close this issue as resolved - thanks for noting this @chrysn! I had neglected to back-trace through issues after approving the async NAL.

We would welcome any further contributions to the async stack!