Paper maps the design space of async/await across modern languages

yoavgo · x · 2026-09-14

The arXiv paper "A Design Space Exploration of Async/Await" (Gavin Gray, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Will Crichton) dissects "straight-line asynchrony" across modern languages: superficially similar async/await constructs differ subtly in execution ordering, task lifecycle, and cancellation semantics, so similar-looking programs can behave divergently. The authors articulate a nine-dimensional design space spanning the full async lifecycle, using concrete examples and formal semantics.

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