Fri 17 Jun 2022 13:50 - 14:10 at Cockatoo - Special Effects Chair(s): Steven Holtzen

Effect handlers encourage programmers to abstract over repeated patterns of complex control flow. As of today, this abstraction comes at a significant price in performance. In this paper, we aim to achieve abstraction without regret for effect handlers.

We present a language for effect handlers in capability-passing style (λCap) and an implementation of this language as a translation to simply-typed lambda calculus in iterated continuation-passing style. A suite of benchmarks indicates that the novel combination of capability-passing style and iterated CPS enables significant speedups over existing languages with effect handlers or control operators. Our implementation technique is general and allows us to generate code in any language that supports first-class functions.

We then identify a subset of programs for which we can further improve the performance and guarantee full elimination of the effect handler abstraction. To formally capture this subset, we refine λCap to λ λCap with a more restrictive type system. We present a type-directed translation for λ λCap that inserts staging annotations and prove that no abstractions or applications related to effect handlers occur in the translated program. Using this second translation we observe additional speedups in some of the benchmarks.

Fri 17 Jun

Displayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change

13:30 - 14:50
Special EffectsSIGPLAN Track at Cockatoo
Chair(s): Steven Holtzen Northeastern University
13:30
20m
Talk
(POPL 2022) Twist: Sound Reasoning for Purity and Entanglement in Quantum Programs
SIGPLAN Track
Charles Yuan Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Christopher McNally Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michael Carbin Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Link to publication DOI Authorizer link Pre-print
13:50
20m
Talk
(ICFP 2020) Compiling effect handlers in capability-passing style
SIGPLAN Track
Philipp Schuster University of Tübingen, Jonathan Immanuel Brachthäuser University of Tübingen, Klaus Ostermann University of Tuebingen
Link to publication DOI Authorizer link Pre-print
14:10
20m
Talk
(POPL 2021) Intensional Datatype Refinement
SIGPLAN Track
Eddie Jones University of Bristol, Steven Ramsay University of Bristol
14:30
20m
Talk
(POPL 2021) A Verified Optimizer for Quantum Circuits
SIGPLAN Track
Kesha Hietala University of Maryland, Robert Rand University of Chicago, Shih-Han Hung University of Maryland, USA, Xiaodi Wu Department of Computer Science, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, and Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, University of Maryland, MD, Michael Hicks University of Maryland at College Park