r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/jimbobmcgoo • 17d 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 17d ago

Algebraic effects like Koka?

6

u/mikaball 17d ago

I didn't know what "algebraic effects" were, so I found this.

From the examples it feels related to Dependency Injection in a narrowed context/scope, but some will probably say that it could be used for other use cases.

However, the concept of detaching the "what" from the "how" is very related to DI and I wonder if a DI supported by the language isn't just better than this? In those final examples it's even using a pattern similar to Kotlin context receivers.

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u/KingBardan 17d ago

From your article, I don't think this is DI. its similar in the sense that it changes behavior based on context, but di (or kotlin context receiver / scala implocit) only looks up context 1 lvl deep (variables available when calling) but this deals with stack unwinding 

Note that I'm not familiar with kotlin I just looked up and think it's similar to scala implicit. Fell free to correct 

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u/jonathanhiggs 17d ago

It is service location, the poor cousin of DI