In that discussion, most of the same points as in this article were already discussed, specifically some async DNS alternatives.
See also here the discussion: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/13619
We knew it was a bad idea at the time it was standardized in the 1990s, but politics — and the inevitable allure of a very convenient sounding (but very bad) idea — meant that the bad idea won.
Funny enough, while Java has deprecated their version of thread cancellation for the same reasons, Haskell still has theirs. When you’re writing code in IO, you have to be prepared for async cancellation anywhere, at any time.
This leads to common bugs in the standard library that you really wouldn’t expect from a language like Haskell; e.g. https://github.com/haskell/process/issues/183 (withCreateProcess async exception safety)
Musl has an undocumented extension that does exactly this: PTHREAD_CANCEL_MASKED passed to pthread_setcancelstate.
It's great and it should be standardized.
If you don’t use the system resolver, you have to glue into the system’s configuration mechanism for resolvers somehow … which isn’t simple — for example, there’s a lot of complex logic on macOS around handling which resolver to use based on what connections, VPNs, etc, are present.
And the there’s nsswitch and other plugin systems that are meant to allow globally configured hooks plug into the name resolution path.