Lambda the Ultimate

My idea here is to introduce a place to discuss ideas about handling memory exhaustion, or related resource limit management. The goal is to have something interesting and useful to talk about, informing future designs of programming language semantics or implementation. Thoughtful new solutions are more on topic than anecdotes about old problems. (Feel free to tell an anecdote if followed by analysis of a workable nice solution.) Funny failure stories are not very useful.

Worst case scenarios are also of interest: situations that would very hard to handle nicely, as test cases for evaluating planned solutions. For example, you might be able to think of an app that would behave badly under a given resource management regime. This resembles thinking of counter examples, but with emphasis on pathology instead of contradiction.

In another discussion topic, Keean Schupke argued the idea failure due to out-of-memory is an effect, while others suggested it was semantically more out-of-scope than an effect in some languages. I am less interested in what is an effect, and more interested in how to handle problems. (The concept is on topic, when focus is what to do about it. Definitions without use cases seem adrift of practical concerns.)

Relevant questions include: After partial failure, what does code still running do about it? How is it presented semantically? Can failed things be cleaned up without poisoning the survivors afterward? How are monitoring, cleanup, and recovery done efficiently with predictable quality? How do PL semantics help a dev plan and organize system behavior after resource failures, especially memory?

hi, I was re-reading an LtU blast from the past about FRP and the discussions there made me think to ask this here community to post some concise updates on how FRP research has been going of late. In case any of you in that field have so much free time.