Create an async API of some kind

[tanriol]

The main options are:

• Reuse the libftdi APIs.
  Upside: close to the upstream APIs.
  Downside: weird integration because these APIs want to drive the libusb event loop themselves.

• Reuse the libftdi APIs, but also provide integration with tokio / async-std.
  Upside: close to upstream and more or less native.
  Downside: a significant amount of nontrivial code.

• Reimplement basic read/write and provide integration with tokio / async-std.
  Upside: more or less native.
  Downside: a significant amount of nontrivial code, including some minimal REing of libftdi.

• Use a separate ftdi thread, provide integration based on futures channels.
  Upside: should be pretty easy.
  Downside: extra latency.

• Something else?

[ScottGibb]

@tanriol Was any work done on this, I find myself in need of using the FTDI device in an async environment and currently hitting a brick wall.

Would be interested to see what people came up with?

[tanriol]

@ScottGibb Some minimal work not integrated with async runtimes. Would be interesting to pick up this, not sure whether I'd have time in the near future. What are your requirements for async operation?

[ScottGibb]

@tanriol I'm trying to use this FT232H breakout board but in an async system. I use this alongside the https://crates.io/crates/ftdi-embedded-hal crate to allow me to test my I2C drivers on my Mac and its really good for testing the drivers before using them on MCU targets.

But recently i've been trying to use this with an actor framework such as https://github.com/petekubiak/post-haste and i'm running into compiler issues as I can't share the synchronous implementation as it doesnt implement sync. The end goal would be to have the ftdi-embedded-hal or other to work with the tokio runtime and I can use I2C/SPI/GPIO in an asychronous fashion.