←back to thread

Algebraic Effects in Practice with Flix

(www.relax.software)
97 points appliku | 1 comments | 07 Sep 25 12:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source
Show context
artemonster ◴[07 Sep 25 14:11 UTC] No.45158295[source]▶
I really want effects to shine and thrive, but since this is a very academic topic, only academic people engage with the research and it comes with academic pedantism, perfectionist worldview, strange attraction to beautiful consistency, etc. This automatically places effect research FAR from any practicality and grounded realism. 2 points, as examples: 1. Ever tried adding a simple print statement for debugging purposes while coding in effectful lang? compiler: "NNNOOOOO!!!! THIS IS AN ERROR; I WILL NEVER COMPILE THIS NONSENSE YOU __MUST__ SPECIFY CONSOLE EFFECT WAAARGHH!11" 2. multi-resumable stacks. how many times you really want to implement custom backtracking for multi resumable computations? this is such an obscure nonsensical use case that is hard to nearly impossible to solve efficiently, but everyone wants to support it. supporting this adds enormous complexity and kills any potential for performance. WHYYYYYYYYY. and yet they focus on this as a holy grail feature but whever there is a showcase they use synthetic "choice" example, lol.
replies(5): >>45158326 #>>45158495 #>>45158777 #>>45159774 #>>45162539 #
1. Sharlin ◴[07 Sep 25 14:34 UTC] No.45158495[source]▶
I’m sure default effects could handle this, just as Rust has some auto traits and default trait bounds. It doesn’t even have to be the full console i/o effect, it can be a specific debug effect that outputs to console in a dev build and to a file or devnull or whatever in release builds, or you could disable it in release builds and the compiler ensures there aren’t stray debug calls left, without needing a specific lint for that.

(Rust does have a similar problem in that debug printing requires the Debug trait bound which can be really annoying when writing generic code. Would be nice if there were a sprinkle of RTTI involved.)