Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2512.03083

Evaluate the Stack Management in Effect Handlers using the libseff C Library

ZeHao Yu
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Effect handlers are increasingly prominent in modern programming for managing complex computational effects, including concurrency, asynchronous operations, and exception handling, in a modular and flexible manner. Efficient stack management remains a significant challenge for effect handlers due to the dynamic control flow changes they introduce. This paper explores a novel stack management approach using user-level overcommitting within the libseff C library, which leverages virtual memory mechanisms and protection-based lazy allocation combined with signal-driven memory commitment. Our user-level overcommitting implementation dynamically resizes stacks on-demand, improving memory utilization and reducing waste compared to traditional methods. We rigorously benchmark and evaluate this novel strategy against conventional fixed-size stacks, segmented stacks, and kernel-based overcommitting, using metrics such as context-switch latency, stack expansion efficiency, multi-threaded performance, and robustness under rapid stack growth conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that kernel-based overcommitting achieves an effective balance between performance and flexibility, whereas our user-level implementation, while flexible, incurs additional overheads, highlighting areas for optimization. This study provides a detailed comparative analysis of various stack management strategies, offering practical recommendations tailored to specific application requirements and operational constraints. Future work will focus on refining user-level overcommitting mechanisms, mitigating non-deterministic behaviors, and expanding benchmark frameworks to include real-world scenarios.

Explore related subjects

cs.PLcs.SE

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

ZeHao Yu. 2025-11-28. Evaluate the Stack Management in Effect Handlers using the libseff C Library. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03083

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Expressive power of one-shot control operators and coroutines

Control operators, such as exceptions and effect handlers, provide a means of representing computational effects in programs abstractly and modularly. While most theoretical studies have focused on multi-shot control operators, one-shot control operators---which restrict the use of captured continuations to at most once---are gaining attention for their balance between expressiveness and efficiency. This study aims to fill the gap. We present a mathematically rigorous comparison of the expressive power among one-shot control operators, including effect handlers, delimited continuations, and even asymmetric coroutines. Following previous studies on multi-shot control operators, we adopt Felleisen's macro-expressiveness as our measure of expressiveness. We verify the folklore that one-shot effect handlers and one-shot delimited-control operators can be macro-expressed by asymmetric coroutines, but not vice versa. We explain why a previous informal argument fails, and how to revise it to make a valid macro-translation.

cs.PL↗
arXiv2026

Equality saturation theory exploration à la carte

Rewrite rules are critical in equality saturation, an increasingly popular technique in optimizing compilers, synthesizers, and verifiers. Unfortunately, developing high-quality rulesets is difficult and error-prone. Recent work to automatically infer rewrite rules does not scale to large terms or grammars. Users struggle to guide inference and incrementally construct rulesets because existing rule inference tools are monolithic and opaque. As a result, most equality saturation users still manually develop and maintain rulesets. This paper proposes Enumo, a new domain-specific language for programmable theory exploration. Enumo provides a small set of core operators that enable users to strategically guide rule inference and incrementally build rulesets. Short Enumo programs easily replicate results from state-of-the-art tools like Ruler, but Enumo programs can also scale to infer deeper rules from larger grammars than prior approaches. Enumo's composable operators even facilitate developing new strategies for ruleset inference. We introduce a new fast-forwarding strategy which does not require evaluating terms in the target language, and thus supports domains that were out of scope for prior work. Enumo is also easy to extend: two new operators suffice to incorporate large language models into rule inference, where they complement guided search. We evaluate Enumo and fast-forwarding across a variety of domains. Compared to state-of-the-art techniques, Enumo can synthesize better rulesets over a diverse set of domains, in some cases matching the effects of manually developed rulesets in systems driven by equality saturation.

cs.PL↗
arXiv2026

Authorization Revocation for Long-Running AI Agents: Root-Scoped Quiescence under Delegation and Asynchronous Execution

Long-running AI agents outlive initiating processes through credentials, delegated tasks, queues, callbacks, reservations, and provider-side operations. Cancellation, process exit, and credential revocation neither close every pre-cut carrier nor distinguish independently authorized shared work. We define root-scoped authorization quiescence: for each manifested sink, a certificate accounts for every cut-relevant acceptance under the retired root-epoch atom that precedes its local fence and excludes protected acceptance under that atom after the fence, while permitting exact rebind to a current, independently sufficient support. The root-scoped quiescence protocol linearizes a root cut, fences old-root expansion and protected sinks, represents alternative and conjunctive authority as antichains of minimal sufficient root sets, and composes provider-frontier certificates into a cutset over registered old-root paths. Exact channel-token accounting reconciles transfers; missing or conflicting evidence remains indeterminate. Under stated assumptions, we prove post-cut issuer non-expansion, support-sound projection, compositional soundness under exact channel conservation, independent-support preservation, merge-order independence, and crash/replay stability. A provider-free late-effect test suite matches 17/17 registered outcomes. Two cancellation-only and one cut-only execution accept the same class of already scheduled late effect; two cut-plus-fence executions, one restart, and one stale-process execution reject it. A separately implemented checker verifies 17/17 traces and rejects 44/44 consistently rehashed semantic regressions. The certificate establishes root-relative authorization quiescence within its bound manifest and configuration, not global idleness, rollback, or business completion.

cs.PL↗