The Async Pattern Graveyard

Most C++ codebases lack a coherent asynchronous model. When a new async operation is needed, engineers reach for whatever feels least bad for the immediate problem.

This talk explores how the above design process plays out in the real world. We start with the simplest possible solution and watch it collapse under ordinary demands: cancellation, composition, lifetimes, error handling, et cetera. Each failure triggers the next “obvious” improvement, which we adopt only to hit new problems. The cycle repeats.

Without ever reading a committee paper we arrive, step by step, at the complete design of std::execution. By the end of the talk, std::execution no longer feels like a committee invention but rather like the only destination an honest, incremental exploration of concurrency could ever have reached.