tokio-rs/tokio

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

33290 stars · 4536 forks observed · 2026-10-01

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Tokio is an event-driven, non-blocking I/O runtime for writing asynchronous applications in Rust. It provides a multithreaded work-stealing task scheduler, an OS-backed reactor (epoll, kqueue, IOCP), async TCP/UDP sockets, timers, filesystem, and synchronization primitives.

Use cases

• write an async TCP echo server in Rust
• build a high-performance network service handling hundreds of thousands of requests per second
• run concurrent async tasks with a work-stealing scheduler
• add timers and timeouts to async Rust code
• build async HTTP or gRPC services on top of hyper or tonic
• run async Rust on servers or embedded devices

When to choose

• you are writing asynchronous Rust and need a runtime to execute futures
• you need fast, scalable non-blocking I/O for network services
• you want the de facto standard Rust async ecosystem (hyper, tonic, tower, axum)
• you need a runtime that scales from many-core servers to embedded devices

When to avoid

• your application is simple, synchronous, and I/O-light where std threads suffice
• you need a different async runtime for compatibility reasons (e.g., async-std, smol)
• you are targeting environments where the runtime's footprint or OS event-loop dependencies are unsuitable

Facets

library · maturity stable

concurrency networking http-server http-client scheduling websocket developer-tools backend networking performance microservices rust windows cross-platform embedded async-runtime async-await event-loop work-stealing-scheduler non-blocking-io tcp udp timers rust-library linux macos

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