Ad-hoc polymorphic delimited continuations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework for building extensible domain-specific languages using ad-hoc polymorphic delimited continuations, enabling efficient and concise effect systems beyond traditional monads.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework that leverages a type class Dsl for creating extensible DSLs and effect systems with ad-hoc polymorphism, improving on existing monad-based approaches.

Findings

Framework supports library-defined keywords for extensible DSLs

Type class Dsl enables efficient, polymorphic effect management

More concise and performant than traditional monad-based systems

Abstract

We designed and implemented a framework for creating extensible domain-specific languages that consists of library-defined keywords. First-class language features in other programming languages can be implemented as libraries with the help of our framework. The core concept in our framework is the type class Dsl, which can be considered as both the ad-hoc polymorphic version of a delimited continuation and a more generic version of Monad. Thus it can be also used as a statically typed extensible effect system that is more efficient and more concise than existing Monad-based effect systems.