Implementation Strategies for First-Class Continuations

  • Authors:
  • William D. Clinger;Anne H. Hartheimer;Eric M. Ost

  • Affiliations:
  • College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115. will@ccs.neu.edu;-;-

  • Venue:
  • Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Scheme and Smalltalk continuations may have unlimited extent.This means that a purely stack-based implementation of continuations,as suffices for most languages, is inadequate.We review several implementation strategies for continuations andcompare their performance using instruction counts for the normalcase and continuation-intensive synthetic benchmarks for other scenarios,including coroutines and multitasking.All of the strategies constrain a compiler in some way, resultingin indirect costs that are hard to measure directly.We use related measurements on a set of benchmarks to calculateupper bounds for these indirect costs.