Futures and fibers are not mutually exclusive, as shown in the latest (2018) Oracle Code One keynote speech, where they demoed project Loom (basically you can wrap a fiber in a CompletableFuture, in the same fashion you can wrap a thread/execution context and expose it in a CompletableFuture). That being said, the JVM team seem to have come to a similar conclusion that using fibers is the least invasive way in terms of syntax as compared to async.