The system Rust has is a lot better than that of Python or JavaScript. Cleanly separating construction from running/polling makes it a lot more predictable and easier to understand what's happening, and to conveniently compose things together using it.

I was really hoping that there'd be movement on a comment without-boats made in https://without.boats/blog/why-async-rust/ to bring a pollster like API into the standard library.

Rust has very good reasons for not wanting to bless an executor by bringing it into the standard library. But most of those would be moot if pollster was brought in. It wouldn't stifle experimentation and refinement of other approaches because it's so limited in scope and useless to all but the simplest of use cases.

But it does in practice solve what many mislabel as the function coloring problem. Powerful rust libraries tend to be async because that's maximally useful. Many provide an alternate synchronous interface but they all do it differently and it forces selection of an executor even if the library wouldn't otherwise force such a selection. (Although to be clear such libraries do often depend on I/O in a manner that also forces a specific executor selection).

Pollster or similar in standard library would allow external crates to be async with essentially no impact on synchronous users.

I feel async is in a very good place now (apart from async trait :[ ) As a regular user who isn't developing libraries async is super simple to use. Your function is async = it must be .await and must be in an async runtime. Probably as simple and straightforward as possible. There are no super annoying anti-patterns to deal with.

The ecosystem being tokio centric is a little strange though

I write and use mostly async code, and I cannot for the life of me understand the async hate.

What do you want Rust to do differently?

What language does async right?

How did Rust not reach its async goals?

Rust even lets you choose the runtime you want. And most big libraries work with several runtimes.