smol in sync / non-blocking context

[Roms1383]

Hello, first and foremost thanks for this library.
This morning I made an experiment that is an unusual context and hits a strange behaviour that you might be able to help me understand.

I'm currently developing a native plugin for game modding with a Rust crate (namely red4ext-rs).
On game startup on Windows I load a bunch of audio files and subtitles from a YAML.
So far I do it without an async runtime, simply with standard methods.

Foreseeing that in the future multiple mods could be loading many YAML files with dozens of audio file paths and subtitles, I was considering adding smol::Executor and spawning a Task that I would directly detach to avoid blocking the thread, letting it load silently in the background instead of slowing down game startup (at least that's the assumption I have, let me know if it's incorrect).

My experiment is roughly like this:

lazy_static! {
    static ref EXECUTOR: Executor<'static> = Executor::new();
}

pub fn setup() -> anyhow::Result<()> {
    EXECUTOR.spawn(async {
        match banks::setup().await { // where banks::setup() is an async fn, the one that loads everything
            // both of these lines simply log to a file
            Ok(_) => { red4ext_rs::info!("banks loaded successfully!"); }
            Err(e) => { red4ext_rs::error!("failed to load banks ({e})"); }
        }
    }).detach();

    // some more setup ...
    Ok(())
}

The result is that there's no crash, but no success or error message is written to the logs.
Furthermore in-game it's like my audio banks have never been loaded at all (while it usually does nicely).

Do you know by any chance what I could possibly be missing?
Do I need further async setup like a channel to communicate when banks::setup() is successful / has failed ?

Thanks in advance 😃

[notgull]

You need to call run to drive the future. Executors on their own don't run, you need to drive them. For example:

std::thread::spawn(|| {
    smol::block_on(EXECUTOR.run(std::future::pending::<()>()));
});

[Roms1383]

Indeed, utterly makes sense, thanks.