What happens with multi-shot continuations now that Obj.clone_continuation was removed? ( https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore/pull/651 ) Anything that requires a “fork” operation, like say, a probabilistic programming EDSL, needs this. None of the old examples I’ve looked at like Delim…

I think the question still stands. You cut the sentence “Extending our system with multi-shot continuations is future work (§8)”. Also the paper is about a particular model based on separation logic rather than OCaml itself (for instance the authors also mention that their continuations are affine i…

@nojb and @gadmm have already answered why we’ve dropped support for clone_continuation now. We will need to track the copiability of the continuation in the continuation type and compiler optimisations also need to be made aware of the possibility of copying. Given the pervasive nature of its effec…

[image] kayceesrk: One can get pretty far with PPL with just one-shot continuations. My student and I did some experiments building a DSL for a PPL to learn about the space: GitHub - Arnhav-Datar/EffPPL: Initially an Algorithmic Diffrentiation Library. Now has been extended to a Probabilistic Pr…

Not a PPL but I’ve been hacking on a little effects-based model checker for concurrent data structures that implements dynamic partial order reduction ( GitHub - sadiqj/dscheck - a WIP!). Multi-shot continuations would have been very useful. I ended up implementing something that involves maintainin…

As far as I understand HMC, it does not address the problem of avoiding repeated computations. Instead, it provides a way to utilize knowledge of the derivative of the target (likelihood/score/posterior/measure/…) function to propose efficient sampling update steps. This has the potential to avoid m…

[image] kayceesrk: I would be interested in collecting usecases where multi-shot continuations are absolutely necessary. I’m working on an implementation of Abstracting Definitional Interpreters . I was pretty excited about the prospect of using effect handlers but I would need multi-shot cont…

For what it is worth, I am in the process of building a library for OCaml 5.00 that provides continuations with multi-shot semantics on top of OCaml’s native continuations. I have managed to get an initial prototype implementation working, though, it is still a bit rough around the edges (and probab…

Thanks Daniel. This is a good compromise. It allows the ecosystem to experiment with multishot continuations while not forcing the decision now on the multicore team. The documentation may include problematic examples to let the user know what can go wrong.

It looks like ocaml-multicont tries to make it easy to mix linear-continuations and multishot-continuations in the same code. My experience was that this always blew up in my face. (As @dhil surely knows, but for context:) As soon as “multishot effects” get nested (which is very soon when they are …

Multi-shot continuations gone forever?

Ecosystem

nojb December 31, 2021, 1:07am 2

Yes, multi-shot continuations are gone and is unlikely that they will find their way back any time soon. One (good) reason is explained in https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3434314 :

and

Cheers,
Nicolas

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Multi-shot continuations gone forever?

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