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reallyreasontoday at 3:03 PM0 repliesview on HN

I think that's the problem in essence, yes. Different executors built on top of different primitives and having different executions strategies will have mutually incompatible constraints.

To spawn a future on tokio, it has to implement `Send`, because tokio is a work-stealing executor. That isn't the case for monoio or other non-work-stealing async executors, where tasks are pinned to the thread they are spawned on and so do not require `Send` or `Sync`, so you can use Rc/RefCell.

Moreover, the way that async executors schedule execution can be _different_. I have a small executor I made that is based on the runtime model of the JS event loop. It's single-threaded async, with explicit creation of new worker threads. That isn't a model that can "slot in" to a suite of traits that adequately represents the abstraction provided by tokio, because the abstraction of my executor and the way it schedules tasks are fundamentally different.

Any reasonably-usable abstraction for the concept of an async runtime would impose too many constraints on the implementation in the name of ensuring runtime-generic code can execute on any standard runtime. A Future, for better or worse, is a sufficiently minimal abstraction of async executability without assuming anything about how the polling/waking behavior is implemented.