std::future and futures-rs

Rust has two kinds of types commonly referred to as Future:

The future defined in the futures-rs crate was the original implementation of the type. To enable the async/await syntax, the core Future trait was moved into Rust’s standard library and became std::future::Future. In some sense, the std::future::Future can be seen as a minimal subset of futures::future::Future.

It is critical to understand the difference between std::future::Future and futures::future::Future, and the approach that async-std takes towards them. In itself, std::future::Future is not something you want to interact with as a user—except by calling .await on it. The inner workings of std::future::Future are mostly of interest to people implementing Future. Make no mistake—this is very useful! Most of the functionality that used to be defined on Future itself has been moved to an extension trait called FutureExt. From this information, you might be able to infer that the futures library serves as an extension to the core Rust async features.

In the same tradition as futures, async-std re-exports the core std::future::Future type. You can actively opt into the extensions provided by the futures crate by adding it to your Cargo.toml and importing FutureExt.

Interfaces and Stability

async-std aims to be a stable and reliable library, at the level of the Rust standard library. This also means that we don't rely on the futures library for our interface. Yet, we appreciate that many users have come to like the conveniences that futures-rs brings. For that reason, async-std implements all futures traits for its types.

Luckily, the approach from above gives you full flexibility. If you care about stability a lot, you can just use async-std as is. If you prefer the futures library interfaces, you link those in. Both uses are first class.

async_std::future

There’s some support functions that we see as important for working with futures of any kind. These can be found in the async_std::future module and are covered by our stability guarantees.

Streams and Read/Write/Seek/BufRead traits

Due to limitations of the Rust compiler, those are currently implemented in async_std, but cannot be implemented by users themselves.