> it has turned out to be a much smaller use-case than anticipated
Well, no, at the time of the design of Rust's async MVP, everyone was pretty well aware that the vast majority of the users would be writing webservers, and that the embedded use case would be a decided minority, if it ever existed at all. That Embassy exists and its ecosystem as vibrant as it is is, if anything, an unexpected triumph.
But regardless of how many people were actually expected to use it in practice, the underlying philosophy remained thus: there exist no features of Rust-the-language that are incompatible with no_std environments (e.g. Rust goes well out of its way, and introduces a lot of complexity, to make things like closures work given such constraints), and it would be exceptional and unprecedented for Rust to violate this principle when it comes to async.
Point taken, I might have formed the wrong impression at the time.
With my C++ background, I'm very much at home with that philosophy, but I think there is room for nuance in how strictly orthodox we are.
C++ does have optional language features that introduce some often unwelcone runtime overhead, like RTTI and unwinding.
Rust does not come configured for freestanding environments out of the box either. Like C++, you are opting out of language features like unwinding as well as the standard library when going freestanding.
I want to affirm that I'm convinced Rust is great for embedded. It's more that I mostly love async when I get to use it for background I/O with a full fledged work stealing thread-per-core marvel of engineering like tokio!
In freestanding Rust the I/O code is platform specific, suddenly I'd have to write the low-level async code myself, and it's not clear this makes the typical embedded project that much higher performance, or all that easy to maintain.
So, I don't want to say anything too radical. But I think the philosophy doesn't have to be as clear cut as no language feature ever incompatible with no-std. Offering a std only language feature is not necessarily closing a door to embedded. We sort of already make opt-out concessions to have a friendlier experience for most people.
(Apologies for the wall of text)