OCaml 5.0 will ship with support for effects! 🎉
However, since the effect implementation is currently untyped, the compiler doesn't yet provide any dedicated syntax to support defining or handling effects. This PPX provides a close approximation to the proposed syntax, hopefully making it simpler to use effects in your OCaml 5.0 code (and easing future migrations to a dedicated syntax).
STATUS: EXPERIMENTAL
In short:
- Declaring effects:
effect E : string -> int
is written asexception%effect E : string -> int
- Handling effects:
| effect (E _) k ->
is written as| [%effect? (E _), k] ->
See the result of porting this PPX to various effectful repositories here:
This library has not yet been released to opam
. To install it, first
opam pin add --yes https://github.com/CraigFe/ppx_effects.git
opam install ppx_effects
Users of dune
can then use this PPX on their
libraries and executables by adding the appropriate stanza field:
(library
...
(preprocess (pps ppx_effects)))
Using the PPX should ideally be exactly like using the dedicated syntax. However, there are a few implementation details that can leak to PPX users:
-
the expansion of
match
/try
expressions containing top-level[%effect? ...]
patterns introduces a locally-abstract type namedcontinue_input
representing the type of values passed tocontinue
(and returned from a suspendedperform
). This type name can appear in error messages, but shouldn't be referred to from user code. (If you find you do need this type name for some reason, raise an issue on this repository!) -
in order to use the low-level effects API provided by the compiler, an effectful computation being
match
-ed ortry
-ed must be wrapped in an allocated thunk (e.g.fun () -> ...
). This thunk has a small performance cost, so very performance-critical code should arrange to make this expression a simple unary function application (as in,match f x with
ortry f x with
) instead – this avoids needing to allocate the thunk.