Work

Effects for efficiency: asymptotic speedup with first-class control

Year: 2020

Type: article

Abstract: We study the fundamental efficiency of delimited control. Specifically, we show that effect handlers enable an asymptotic improvement in runtime complexity for a certain class of functions. We consider thegeneric countproblem using a pure PCF-like base language λband its extension with effect handlers λh. We show that λhadmits an asymptotically more efficient implementation of generic count than any λbimplementation. We also show that this efficiency gap remains when λbis extended with mutable state. To our knowledge this result is the first of its kind for control operators.

Source: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

DOI: 10.1145/3408982

Authors: Daniel Hillerström, Sam Lindley, John Longley

Institutions: University of Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt University, Imperial College London

Language: English

Topic: Logic, programming, and type systems

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funders: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, H2020 European Research Council

Awards: From Data Types to Session Types---A Basis for Concurrency and Distribution, EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Pervasive Parallelism, A programming language bridging theory and practice for scientific data curation, G7918631928