TL;DR
This paper presents an efficient implementation of effect handlers for OCaml, enabling modular programming with user-defined effects while maintaining compatibility and minimal performance overhead.
Contribution
The paper introduces the first retrofitting of effect handlers onto OCaml, addressing compatibility and performance challenges in a practical, efficient manner.
Findings
Imposes only 1% overhead on non-effect code
Maintains compatibility with stack inspection tools
Efficient for code utilizing effect handlers
Abstract
Effect handlers have been gathering momentum as a mechanism for modular programming with user-defined effects. Effect handlers allow for non-local control flow mechanisms such as generators, async/await, lightweight threads and coroutines to be composably expressed. We present a design and evaluate a full-fledged efficient implementation of effect handlers for OCaml, an industrial-strength multi-paradigm programming language. Our implementation strives to maintain the backwards compatibility and performance profile of existing OCaml code. Retrofitting effect handlers onto OCaml is challenging since OCaml does not currently have any non-local control flow mechanisms other than exceptions. Our implementation of effect handlers for OCaml: (i) imposes a mean 1% overhead on a comprehensive macro benchmark suite that does not use effect handlers; (ii) remains compatible with program analysis…
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