I watched a good video on Delimited Continuations from Alexis King last night. She explains them very well both semantically and with some examples. I'm glad to see that native support for them has been introduced to Haskell.
In figuring out what approach to take for my full program analysis for algebraic effects, I'm looking into a few things:
One is this paper Functional derivation of a virtual machine for delimited continuations, which I think was recommended to me by Kimball when I was first looking into algebraic effects, and first learning about control flow analyses. I'll probably also look into both the typed directed continuation passing style transformation that was originally implemented for Koka, as well as the more recent Generalized evidence passing for effect handlers: efficient compilation of effect handlers to C.
As far as progress today on figuring out some benchmarks for how to improve Koka's performance, I've added some basic benchmarks, but there is still more research to go, to really show the difference. I wish there were more real-world example programs I could benchmark the changes on. I'm sure I'll be contributing to that due to my interest in Koka. I mostly spent time on the benchmarking scripts, but in doing so I also added / exposed a few methods for dealing with getting file information.
As far as this paper goes, it mentions that one aspect of delimited continuations that it allows dynamic code generation. I definitely want to look into that paper Shifting the stage: staging with delimited control . I also want to read the book Compiling with Continuations since I've heard it mentioned several times recently.
The paper I'm reading, turns out not to be related to analysis, but more related to implementing delimited continuations through a sequence of transformations to a definitional interpreter -> into a virtual machine style. This should work well enough for an analysis, but I should check to see if there is another paper specifically about analysis, which I think Kimball mentioned. Though he did mention this paper at the meeting on Tuesday I'm pretty sure due to what he mentioned about delimited continuations being implemented via a double CPS transform. Now it makes more sense to me. It's not the program itself that needs the double CPS transform, but the interpreter.
Tomorrow's Plans:
- Continue working on benchmarking the differences for linear effect annotations, and integer annotations
- Read a paper on analysis of delimited continuations or logic flow analysis
- Work on full CFA for delimited continuations, or implement the double CPS transform for the interpreter in Racket, Dart or Koka