At the moment sending our request will block until it returns, meaning the entire GUI will lock up. This is bad both from a user experience point of view, and because the window is no longer responding to events so the operating system will think it's gone into zombie mode (popping up the standard "This program is not responding" dialog).

A much better way of doing things would be to spin the request onto a background thread, periodically polling it and getting the result if the job is completed.

TODO: create a Task abstraction using futures and futures_cpupool to spawn an arbitrary closure.

TODO: Add the Task abstraction to ffi-helpers, as well as maybe a couple macros for generating the extern "C" functions for things like polling, creation, and destruction to deal with the fact that generics aren't FFI-safe.