Future Work: Special support for effects and handlers in the IDE

[b-studios]

Some unstructured notes about things we might want to support at some point:

Possible IDE features:

• infer effects from effect holes
• update effects (fix effects refactoring)
• display inferred effects / types
• what are better alternatives to stack traces?

Questions:

• what effects are required by this function?
• effect provenance: where does this effect come from? (racket like) -- since we already translate to capabilities, we can easily show this particular binding information to the user
• what are potential handlers (call site analysis, called from)
• given a handler: which calls to operations might be handled?

def bar(x: Int) = {
    ...
}

def foo(): Int / Print = <?
  val x = foo();
  x
?> // ?? =. <? () ?>

def bar() = {
    val position = 42
    position.<? { x => x + 1 } ?>
    ({ x => 42 })(5)
    ()
}

[b-studios]

This was addressed by @timmy-newtron in his BSc thesis, but sadly never merged