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Ernst Denert Award for Software Engineering 2020 pp 15–43Cite as

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What You See Is What You Get: Practical Effect Handlers in Capability-Passing Style

What You See Is What You Get: Practical Effect Handlers in Capability-Passing Style

  • Jonathan Immanuel Brachthäuser9 
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  • Open Access
  • First Online: 28 February 2022

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Abstract

Structuring control flow is an essential task almost every programmer faces on a daily basis. At the same time, the control flow of software applications is becoming increasingly complicated, motivating languages to include more and more features like asynchronous programming and generators. Effect handlers are a promising alternative since they can express many of these features as libraries. To bring effect handlers closer to the software engineering practice, we present capability passing as an implementation technique for effect handlers. Capability passing provides the basis for the integration of effect handlers into mainstream object-oriented programming languages and thereby unlocks novel modularization strategies. It also enables programmers to apply lexical reasoning about effects and gives rise to a new form of effect polymorphism. Finally, it paves the path for efficient compilation strategies of control effects.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all my collaborators and coauthors for significantly contributing to all of the papers, which this chapter is directly or indirectly based upon [6,7,8,9, 12, 52, 53, 56].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Jonathan Immanuel Brachthäuser

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  1. Jonathan Immanuel Brachthäuser
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Correspondence to Jonathan Immanuel Brachthäuser .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Prof. Dr. Michael Felderer

  2. Department of Computer Science, Kiel University, Kiel, Germany

    Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Hasselbring

  3. Corporate Research, ABB, Ladenburg, Germany

    Heiko Koziolek

  4. Institute of Computer Science, Technical University Munich, Garching, Germany

    Prof. Dr. Florian Matthes

  5. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Prof. Dr. Lutz Prechelt

  6. Program Structures and Data Organization, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Prof. Dr. Ralf Reussner

  7. Software Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Prof. Dr. Bernhard Rumpe

  8. Software Engineering and Automotive Informatics, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

    Prof. Dr. Ina Schaefer

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Brachthäuser, J.I. (2022). What You See Is What You Get: Practical Effect Handlers in Capability-Passing Style. In: Felderer, M., et al. Ernst Denert Award for Software Engineering 2020. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83128-8_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83128-8_3

  • Published: 28 February 2022

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