alt Hacker NewsLooking at the link, it was quite an eye-opener moment (atleast for me) to see so many language-differentiating features - exceptions, async/await, continuations, generators - can all just be abstracted into one concept called "typed continuations". I'm still wrapping my head around this.
On one hand, I'd assume a "focused" feature, like exceptions, would always be easier to fine-tune and optimize the language, runtime and workflow – rather than generalizing it.
But at the same time, the prospect of saying all those are just special forms of a stacked "yield" (just for my mental model) is quite tantalizing.
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PL theory seems to be in an infinite loop between arbitrary control flow like call/cc and then realizing it's hard to reason about and restricting it.
I do wish we could land on a standard model for implementing non local control flow. Like growable stacks.
You might enjoy digging into the world of effect handlers: it's a very neat model for expressing these features and boils down to continuations in the implementation.