But that's true of everything. You can't use a struct except through an "executor" of some sort. Once you've created it, it sits there and does nothing until you exercise it through its methods or other methods that take it. In that case, there's no ambiguity because the type is explicit. I guess the problem is that really `async fn` looks like a function, but isn't really a function, it's a future. The semantics of a future are quite different to the semantics of a function. That's only a problem if you think the semantics of `async fn` should closely reflect a function.

The thing is, once you grok async in rust, other things make sense, like being able to construct futures by implementing `Future` on a struct. You don't actually need `async fn` to do async rust. It's just syntactic sugar, just like await is.