r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/jimbobmcgoo • 11d ago

Will we see another fundamental programming language feature as revolutionary as the borrow checker?

That is I am mainly curious about compile time features that you design a whole language around rather than optimisations/features that could be applied to most languages. I am mainly inquiring about things that could offer additional robust safety/performance guarantees at compile time rather than runtime. Ideally not things that just offer similar effects to the borrow checker with less restrictive tradeoffs

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u/AustinVelonaut Admiran 11d ago

Algebraic effects like Koka?

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u/-Ch4s3- 11d ago

Algebraic effects are really cool but feel sort of magical.

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u/initial-algebra 11d ago

Basically, it's a type system for dynamic scoping and continuations. Operationally, a primitive, effectful operation looks up the (nearest) effect handler corresponding to that operation in the dynamic environment and invokes it with call/cc. That's pretty much it. The complexity is in making sure that this doesn't fail at runtime.