5 ms·

Well, i would love to see some applications of delimited continuations other than those mentioned here: http://matt.might.net/articles/programming-with-continua

by xfer 9y ago

Well, i would love to see some applications of delimited continuations other than those mentioned here: http://matt.might.net/articles/programming-with-continuations--exceptions-backtracking-search-threads-generators-coroutines/ http://matt.might.net/articles/programming-with-continuation... . Most languages have support for these applications. The only thing other than that i have seen work is continuation based web servers.

tyoverby 9y ago
The page that you linked to shows off some features that are not really found in any major programming langauge. Time-traveling search is a big one for me. Many languages have exceptions, but with shift/reset, you can implement your own exception handling behavior trivially, including things like resumable exceptions. Some languages have async/await, but almost all of those implementations are state-machine based, which means that they don't compose well when used with more complex language features like generics and higher order functions. But more than that, in continuation-based asynchronous programming, "async" functions are just normal functions that execute in an async prompt. Here's an example of a multi-user asynchronous TCP echo server in my toy language with tagged delimited continuations: async { loop { let conn = accept_connection("localhost", 9999) async { loop { let data = conn.next_data() conn.send(data) } } } } Where all of those asyncrhonous constructs (including `async` itself) are really short wrappers around delimited continuation machinery. You'll notice that the nested calls to `async` indicate that there are two asyncrhonous contexts 1. Connection acceptance happen on their own "thread" of control 2. Each connection gets their own context in which everything is internally asyncrhonous
- xfer 9y ago
  time-travelling search can be done with recursion. Otherwise, i agree that they don't compose well with each other in some languages. However, it is harder to implement efficiently as far as i understand; time will tell if they are widely understood to be implemented in future languages.
tyoverby 9y ago
Another thing that I should mention is that most langauges, features like generators / async / exceptions don't compose well at all. In a language where these features are implemented through continuations, it's really easy to pick how they interact, leading to some really powerful tricks!
srean 9y ago
Could you list some these (main stream) languages. I know a few but I am surely missing the others you know of.

by xfer 9y ago

tyoverby 9y ago

The page that you linked to shows off some features that are not really found in any major programming langauge. Time-traveling search is a big one for me. Many languages have exceptions, but with shift/reset, you can implement your own exception handling behavior trivially, including things like resumable exceptions. Some languages have async/await, but almost all of those implementations are state-machine based, which means that they don't compose well when used with more complex language features like generics and higher order functions. But more than that, in continuation-based asynchronous programming, "async" functions are just normal functions that execute in an async prompt. Here's an example of a multi-user asynchronous TCP echo server in my toy language with tagged delimited continuations: async { loop { let conn = accept_connection("localhost", 9999) async { loop { let data = conn.next_data() conn.send(data) } } } } Where all of those asyncrhonous constructs (including `async` itself) are really short wrappers around delimited continuation machinery. You'll notice that the nested calls to `async` indicate that there are two asyncrhonous contexts 1. Connection acceptance happen on their own "thread" of control 2. Each connection gets their own context in which everything is internally asyncrhonous

xfer 9y ago
time-travelling search can be done with recursion. Otherwise, i agree that they don't compose well with each other in some languages. However, it is harder to implement efficiently as far as i understand; time will tell if they are widely understood to be implemented in future languages.

tyoverby 9y ago

Another thing that I should mention is that most langauges, features like generators / async / exceptions don't compose well at all. In a language where these features are implemented through continuations, it's really easy to pick how they interact, leading to some really powerful tricks!

srean 9y ago

Could you list some these (main stream) languages. I know a few but I am surely missing the others you know of.