Re: [Caml-list] Continuations

[Christophe Raffalli <Christophe.Raffalli@univ-savoie.fr>]

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Ceri Storey wrote:
> I was just wondering if there any possibility of there being support
> for continuations in a future version of ocaml?
> 
> They'd be useful in all sorts of situations, eg: restarable network
> protocol parsers, or co-routines.

Continuations are nice ... but they need to save all the stack. This can
be done in a reasonable way by saving only one page (or two if the first 
one is almost empty) of the stack and marking the other pages as 
unwritable and saving the next pages only when needed but:

- This is not portable to all platforms (windows may be OK ?).
- Intensive use of continuations are still time consuming.
- Saving all the stack leads to important memory leaks because in 
general only some of the information in the stack are necessary to call 
the continuation and the other leads to useless pointer kept for the GC.

It is in general better to implement yourself the bactracking you need 
by keeping a minimal record containing the information you need to 
backtrack and adding one argument (with such a list of records) to all 
the functions that may trigger backtracking.

But, still, if you program well, and you know about the possible memory 
leaks, you can program with continuations and it is a pity they are not 
there in OCaml :-( Especialy for those (like me) who extract programs 
from classical proofs :-)

-- 
Christophe Raffalli
Université de Savoie
Batiment Le Chablais, bureau 21
73376 Le Bourget-du-Lac Cedex

tél: (33) 4 79 75 81 03
fax: (33) 4 79 75 87 42
mail: Christophe.Raffalli@univ-savoie.fr
www: http://www.lama.univ-savoie.fr/~RAFFALLI
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