Higher-order asynchronous effects

Ahman, Danel (author), Pretnar, Matija (author)

We explore asynchronous programming with algebraic effects. We complement their conventional synchronous treatment by showing how to naturally also accommodate asynchrony within them, namely, by decoupling the execution of operation calls into signalling that an operation's implementation needs to be executed, and interrupting a running computation with the operation's result, to which the computation can react by installing interrupt handlers. We formalise these ideas in a small core calculus and demonstrate its flexibility using examples ranging from a multi-party web application, to pre-emptive multi-threading, to (cancellable) remote function calls, to a parallel variant of runners of algebraic effects. In addition, the paper is accompanied by a formalisation of the calculus's type safety proofs in Agda, and a prototype implementation in OCaml.

• Language: English
• Keywords: algebraic effects, asynchrony, concurrency, interrupt handling, signals, promises
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FMF - Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Publication date: 01.01.2024
• Year: 2024
• Number of pages: Str. 26:1-26:50
• Numbering: Vol. 20, iss. 3, [article no.] 26
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-167167
• UDC: 004.42:510.6
• ISSN on article: 1860-5974
• DOI: 10.46298/lmcs-20(3:26)2024
• COBISS.SI-ID: 225766915
• Publication date in RUL: 11.02.2025

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Logical methods in computer science
• Shortened title: Log. methods comput. sci.
• Publisher: Institut für Theoretische Informatik, Technische Universität Braunschweig.
• ISSN: 1860-5974
• COBISS.SI-ID: 16816473

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.