@microsoft-github-policy-service agree company="Neon, Inc."

For non-wasm (which is the only thing this touches), you are already depending on tokio through reqwest and AFAIK there are really no good alternatives in the Rust ecosystem right now:

• isahc is nice but depends on libcurl which makes cross compilation harder, and it's not very actively maintained.
• Using hyper directly is an option, smol_hyper integrates it with smol as an alternative to tokio. But you'd have to write a bunch of (glue) code yourself on top if you need cookie handling, redirect handling, or such.

Yeah there is already an (optional) dependency on tokio through reqwest but most people will probably enable reqwest anyways, so they already pull in tokio. At least that's what we are doing as users of the azure SDK.

The current state pulls in the async-io crate unconditionally, which is IMO worse because that way, a lot of users end up depending on both async-io as well as tokio.

If you really want, it is possible to make the dependency optional by adding a crate-private module that either contains a reexport of tokio's Command struct, or if the tokio dependency is not enabled, contains a struct called Command with all the APIs we use, being a wrapper of std's Command (we cannot reexport std's Command directly because some APIs are async).

We actually do have use cases and budding implementation that will not use tokio but monoio in our feature branch. tokio will still be our default async runtime via reqwest.

That said, this branch will eventually be replaced but community-supported for some time. While no one can say whether the whole community is using tokio, it may be a safe assumption until proven otherwise and then we could implement @arpad-m's idea.

@ctaggart @demoray @jamesbell what do you think? For the stated reasons I'm all for replacing unmaintained async-process as mentioned in #1652. At this time for this branch, I wonder how strict we want to maintain a no-hard-dependency stance on tokio. Do you know of anyone using a different HTTP stack and/or async runtime?