It’s not just that. There’s a few big problems with Rust async aside from the normal coloring problem that is inherent to async and not worth talking about.
* The async runtime and async functions are decomposed but tightly coupled. That means while you could swap out runtimes, a crate built against one runtime can’t generally be used with another unless explicitly designed to support multiple. I believe C++ has a similar problem but no other major language I’m aware of has this problem - that’s typically because there’s only a single runtime and it’s embedded in the language. Things like timers and I/O are not interoperable because the API you use has to be for the runtime you’re running under. I believe there’s work ongoing to try to remedy this although in practice I think that’s difficult (eg what if you’re using a crate relying on epoll-based APIs but the runtime is io_uring).
* async in traits. I believe that’s coming this year although the extra boxing it forces to make that work makes that not something 0-cost you can adopt in a super hot path.
* async requires pinned types which makes things very complex to manage and is a uniquely Rust concept (in fact I read a conceptually better alternative proposal for how to have solved the pin/unpin problem on HN not too long ago, but that ship has long sailed I fear).
* The borrow checker doesn’t know if your async function is running on a work stealing runtime or not which means there’s a lot more hoop jumping via unsafe if you want optimal performance.
* async functions are lazy and require polling before they do anything. That can be a bit surprising and require weird patterns.
Don’t get me wrong. The effing-mad crate is a fantastic demonstration of the power of algebraic effects to comprehensively solve coloring issues (async, failability, etc). But I think there’s stuff with runtime interop that’s also important. I don’t think anyone is yet seriously tackling improving the borrow checker for thread per core async.
I mean... that's not really the pain that people are referring to when they are struggling with async Rust, especially when you compare it other languages like JavaScript that also have a difference between async and regular functions.
Unison [1] has algebraic effects as a first-class feature. They call them "abilities" there. You can make async about as transparent/opaque as you want it. Docs on abilities in [2].
I don't know that anybody is running a company on it yet, no. They've got a couple big milestones coming down the pike, which might make it more attractive to people.
Algebraic effects would solve this, but I don’t know any language other than OCaml that is working on that approach.