Runners in action

Abstract

Runners of algebraic effects, also known as comodels, provide a mathematical model of resource management. We show that they also give rise to a programming concept that models top-level external resources, as well as allows programmers to modularly define their own intermediate "virtual machines". We capture the core ideas of programming with runners in an equational calculus ${\lambda }_{\mathsf{coop}}$, which we equip with a sound and coherent denotational semantics that guarantees the linear use of resources and execution of finalisation code. We accompany ${\lambda }_{\mathsf{coop}}$ with examples of runners in action, provide a prototype language implementation in OCaml, as well as a Haskell library based on ${\lambda }_{\mathsf{coop}}$.

ESOP 2020 final version + online appendix