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Direct-Style Effects Explained

Direct-style effects, also known as algebraic effects and effect handlers, are the next big thing in programming languages. At the same time I see some confusion about direct-style effects. In this post I want to address this confusion by explaining the what, the why, and the how of direct-style effects using a Scala 3 implementation as an example.

Next up we’ll see some shortcomings of this implementation and see how they can solved by two language features, one well known (delimited continuations) and one in development (type system innovations). Therefore, replacing side effects with something in keeping with these core principles is considered an important problem in functional programming. I think it’s only in Scala Native that the developers will have the flexibility to implement the runtime support needed for a full effect system, and also to really maximise its advantages by providing things like region based memory management.

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