In the last section, we saw how tasks composed of multiple futures are often difficult to write and debug. One attempt at remedying this is using a crate that wraps futures and associated error handling, yielding a more linear flow of code. This crate is called futures-await and is under active development.
This crate provides two primary mechanisms of dealing with futures:
- The #[async] attribute that can be applied to functions, marking them as asynchronous. These functions must return the Result of their computation as a future.
- The await! macro that can be used with async functions to consume the future, returning a Result.
Given these constructions, our earlier example download will look like this:
#[async]fn download(url: ...
