frank VS eff

How does this compare to other effect-oriented languages like Koka, Frank, and Eff?

I've been doing some work with Koka lately, but I briefly looked into the other three (including Effekt) and it mostly came down to, 'Koka seems most active in development'[1] and 'Koka had the easiest to use documentation for me'[2].

[1] E.g. https://github.com/effekt-lang/effekt had its last commit back in June; https://github.com/frank-lang/frank last commit last year; but https://github.com/koka-lang/koka last update was Oct 15. Effekt seems semi-active, at least, compared to Frank. While stability is good, I wouldn't expect it in a language actively being used for research.

[2] Comparing https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/book.html and https://effekt-lang.org/docs/ and https://www.eff-lang.org/learn/

Frank's effect handling. "A strict functional programming language with a bidirectional effect type system designed from the ground up around a novel variant of Plotkin and Pretnar's effect handler abstraction. ... Frank [is different from other PLs with effect type systems in that it is based on] generalising the basic mechanism of functional abstraction itself. A function is simply the special case of a Frank operator that interprets no commands. Moreover, Frank's operators can be multihandlers which simultaneously interpret commands from several sources at once, without disturbing the direct style of functional programming with values. Effect typing in Frank employs a novel form of effect polymorphism which avoid mentioning effect variables in source code. This is achieved by propagating an ambient ability inwards, rather than accumulating unions of potential effects outwards."

You can swap-out implementations for testing, avoid the crazy N^2 instances issues, etc. They're pretty cool. Currently there are many competing libraries. polysemy and eff both have good examples on their homepages.

Effect systems and Algebraic effects. ocaml has just released a stripped-down effect system. People are also working on Effect systems for Haskell (eff, fused-effects, effet). Koka is a language built with effects first and foremost and it’s rapidly gaining popularity. Unison also has effects.

There are also a few subtle issues that arise with delconts related to semantics of higher order effects (see here and here), but they might be solvable.

Details are in https://github.com/hasura/eff/issues/12 and https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/pywuqg/unresolved_challenges_of_scoped_effects_and_what/.

You'll get fearless parallel with STM in the mixture, and GHC is getting a work in progress effect system for Haskell, as Delimited continuation primops has been merged.

My last example is algebraic effects, some of which have been made possible in a both practical and efficient way thanks to extremely recent research, and that I can use to implement architectures like Ports and Adapters or Clean Architecture and have very maintainable code. (Extensible Effects — An Alternative to Monad Transformers was published in 2013, Effect Handlers in Scope was published in 2014 and they are behind Polysemy, while there is ongoing work on effects with even better performance, like Eff)

cleff's Eff monad is esentially implemented as a ReaderT IO. [...] This is first done by eff, [...]

Here is link number 1 - Previous text "eff"

This is essentially how continuation based effect systems work, check out eveff and eff.

Languages such as Koka only support algebraic effects, not scoping operations such as catch and listen. The Effect Handlers in Scope paper introduces scoping operations, which lead to the Haskell libraries fused-effects and polysemy, but they turned out to have some weird semantics. eff is her effort to fix that.