You can eat it in the same thread. Some frameworks do that implicitly (even without await) . You can also control if it's consumed in particular thread or thread pool and decide which thread should continue. More, you can chain and/or parallelize it with other async and not-async functions without any effort. Additionally, you can handle errors and exceptions same as it's async and not-async function. Every good async/await framework offers that out of the box. More, some frameworks abstract executors and you can run the function remotely or even persist it with context. Of course you can achieve all that without async/await, but it makes that extremely easy.