Merge pull request #245 from Be-ing/mention_embedded

Intro: mention applicability of async for embedded

Author: nrc

src/intro.md

@@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ You can navigate this book in multiple ways:
 
 In concurrent programming, the program does multiple things at the same time (or at least appears to). Programming with threads is one form of concurrent programming. Code within a thread is written in sequential style and the operating system executes threads concurrently. With async programming, concurrency happens entirely within your program (the operating system is not involved). An async runtime (which is just another crate in Rust) manages async tasks in conjunction with the programmer explicitly yielding control by using the `await` keyword.
 
-Because the operating system is not involved, *context switching* in the async world is very fast. Furthermore, async tasks have much lower memory overhead than operating system threads. This makes async programming a good fit for systems which need to handle very many concurrent tasks and where those tasks spend a lot of time waiting (for example, for client responses or for IO).
+Because the operating system is not involved, *context switching* in the async world is very fast. Furthermore, async tasks have much lower memory overhead than operating system threads. This makes async programming a good fit for systems which need to handle very many concurrent tasks and where those tasks spend a lot of time waiting (for example, for client responses or for IO). It also makes async programming a good fit for microcontrollers with very limited amounts of memory and no operating system that provides threads.
 
 Async programming also offers the programmer fine-grained control over how tasks are executed (levels of parallelism and concurrency, control flow, scheduling, and so forth). This means that async programming can be expressive as well as ergonomic for many uses. In particular, async programming in Rust has a powerful concept of cancellation and supports many different flavours of concurrency (expressed using constructs including `spawn` and it's variations, `join`, `select`, `for_each_concurrent`, etc.). These allow composable and reusable implementations of concepts like timeouts, pausing, and throttling.