kal VS continuation

It's obsolete now, but before async/await was part of JS proper I worked on a compile-to-JS language that handled this by compiling to callbacks: https://github.com/rzimmerman/kal

It included try/catch support and fancy stuff, like loops. The source may be interesting for anyone interested in compilers: https://github.com/rzimmerman/kal/blob/master/source/generat...

The Kal compiler is written in Kal, but it's supposed to be easy to read. Surprisingly the browser demo still works: http://rzimmerman.github.io/kal/demo.html

Further, there is a delimited continuation library that effection uses: https://github.com/thefrontside/continuation

While working on effection (https://github.com/thefrontside/effection) we spent a bunch of time ensuring that our delimited continuations could handle deep recursive call stacks in Deno.

PR: https://github.com/thefrontside/continuation/pull/11

TCO would have definitely simplified this issue.

What’s worse is hitting maximum memory callstack exception is very tricky to catch and is not reliable across runtimes. So when a user hits it it can be tricky to track down.

- https://github.com/thefrontside/continuation

- https://github.com/thefrontside/effection/tree/v3

- https://github.com/neurosnap/starfx

The last one intends to replace redux-saga using DCs.

Here’s a presentation I gave recently talking about DCs in typescript: https://youtu.be/uRbqLGj_6mI?si=XI0JNMKMoO2VHMvM

These libraries rely on deliminited continuations:

https://github.com/thefrontside/continuation

Because of this tiny implementation we are able to express any async flow construct with less code than relying on something like async/await or callbacks.