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Concurrent System Programming with Effect Handlers

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Trends in Functional Programming (TFP 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10788))

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Abstract

Algebraic effects and their handlers have been steadily gaining attention as a programming language feature for composably expressing user-defined computational effects. While several prototype implementations of languages incorporating algebraic effects exist, Multicore OCaml incorporates effect handlers as the primary means of expressing concurrency in the language. In this paper, we make the observation that effect handlers can elegantly express particularly difficult programs that combine system programming and concurrency without compromising performance. Our experimental results on a highly concurrent and scalable web server demonstrate that effect handlers perform on par with highly optimised monadic concurrency libraries, while retaining the simplicity of direct-style code.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A comprehensive list of example programs written using effect handlers in Multicore OCaml is available at https://github.com/kayceesrk/effects-examples.

  2. 2.

    http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libev.html.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/giltene/wrk2.

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Acknowledgements

Daniel Hillerström was supported by EPSRC grant CDT in Pervasive Parallelism (EP/L01503X/1). K.C. Sivaramakrishnan was supported by a Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England

    Stephen Dolan, Anil Madhavapeddy & K. C. Sivaramakrishnan

  2. The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

    Daniel Hillerström

  3. Jane Street Group, New York City, USA

    Spiros Eliopoulos & Leo White

Authors
  1. Stephen Dolan
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  2. Spiros Eliopoulos
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  5. K. C. Sivaramakrishnan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to K. C. Sivaramakrishnan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

    Meng Wang

  2. University of Kent, Kent, United Kingdom

    Scott Owens

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Dolan, S., Eliopoulos, S., Hillerström, D., Madhavapeddy, A., Sivaramakrishnan, K.C., White, L. (2018). Concurrent System Programming with Effect Handlers. In: Wang, M., Owens, S. (eds) Trends in Functional Programming. TFP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10788. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89719-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89719-6_6

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