Comment by watusername

Other commenters have already provided examples for other languages, and it's the same for Rust: async functions are just regular functions that return an impl Future type. As a sync function, you can call a bunch of async functions and return the futures to your caller to handle, or you can block your current thread with the block_on function typically available through a handle (similar to the Io object here) provided by your favorite async runtime [0].

In other words, you don't need such an Io object upfront: You need it when you want to actually drive its execution and get the result. From this perspective, the Zig approach is actually less flexible than Rust.

[0]: https://docs.rs/tokio/latest/tokio/runtime/struct.Handle.htm...