Continuations: What Have They Ever Done for Us? (Experience Report)

TL;DR

This paper reports on the use of delimited continuations in the Congame platform for economic studies, highlighting benefits and challenges such as data persistence, dynamic variables, memory management, and debugging.

Contribution

It demonstrates the practical application of delimited continuations in managing stateful interactions in economic experiments, including insights on handling associated challenges.

Findings

Delimited continuations simplify managing participant flow.

Challenges include data persistence and memory leaks.

Debugging continuations remains complex.

Abstract

Surveys and experiments in economics involve stateful interactions: participants receive different messages based on earlier answers, choices, and performance, or trade across many rounds with other participants. In the design of Congame, a platform for running such economic studies, we decided to use delimited continuations to manage the common flow of participants through a study. Here we report on the positives of this approach, as well as some challenges of using continuations, such as persisting data across requests, working with dynamic variables, avoiding memory leaks, and the difficulty of debugging continuations.