Async Isn't Real & Cannot Hurt You

Async programming in Rust, particularly with Tokio, forces developers to use static lifetimes which effectively disables much of Rust's borrow checker benefits. The author argues that while async Rust is powerful, it breaks Rust's core promise of fearless concurrency through compile-time guarantees. Solutions include using scoped approaches, alternative runtimes like smol, or sticking with native threads and libraries like rayon for parallelism when async isn't strictly necessary.