The past two days I've had a chance to use async/await in Rust for the first time. It was a useful comparison against the old way since I was refactoring existing code to use it. It made things *much* easier and simpler. 1/5

Using futures and streams with chained callback functions (the old way) instead of async/await (the new way) led to lots of struggling over ownership and lifetimes (and fighting with the borrow checker). In the same code restructured to use async/await, it's much easier. 2/5

It feels like a big improvement -- and probably a bigger difference than the introduction of async/await in Javascript. 3/5

That said, I'd note that there was also one unfair advantage with the new way, which is that one of my dependent libraries, crates.io/crates/irc , has restructured to get along a better with the new tokio/futures infrastructure than it did with the old. 4/5