This library provides an interoperability layer with Scala's Future.

This is the extension method added to IO companion object:

def fromFuture[A](ftr: () => Future[A])(ec: ExecutionContext): Task[A] =

There are a few things to clarify here:

• ftr, the expression producing the Future value, is a thunk (or Function0). The reason for that is, Future is eager, it means as soon as you call Future.apply the effect has started performing, that's not a desired behavior in Pure FP (which ZIO encourages). So it's recommended to declare expressions creating Futures using def instead of val.
• Also you have to be explicit on which EC you want to use, having it implicit, as in the standard library, is a bad practice.
• Finally, as you can see, the IO returned fixes the error type to Throwable since that's the only possible cause for a failed Future.

// EC is not implicit
val myEC: ExecutionContext = ...

// future defined in thunk using def
def myFuture: Future[ALotOfData] = myLegacyHeavyJobReturningFuture(...)
val myIO: Task[ALotOfData] = IO.fromFuture(myFuture _)(myEC)

This extension method is added to values of type Task[A]:

def toFuture: UIO[Future[A]]

Notice that we don't actually return a Future but an infallible IO producing the Future when it's performed, that's again because as soon as we have a Future in our hands, whatever it does is already happening.

As an alternative, a more flexible extension method is added to any IO[E, A] to convert to Future as long as you can provide a function to convert from E to Throwable.

def toFutureE(f: E => Throwable): UIO[Future[A]]

val safeFuture: UIO[Future[MoarData]] = myShinyNewApiBasedOnZio(...).toFuture(MyError.toThrowable)
val itsHappening: Future[MoarData] = unsafeRun(safeFuture)