MF#K: Inferring Async/Await in Firefly [@Prosa]

Talk by Joakim Ahnfelt-Rønne, co-designer of Firefly

Firefly is a functional programming language that is currently in development. This talk will focus on one of its most distinctive features - colorless async/await with built-in cancellation support.

In Firefly, effects, including async, are controlled through first-class capabilities. In this talk, I will present a static analysis that takes advantage of first-class capabilities to produce a sync and an async version of each function, and to decide when to call one or the other. The result is that the programmer never has to write async or await explicitly. This works for all functions - even polymorphic functions such as map.

The talk will also include a quick introduction to the language, as well as an example program that implements a tiny full stack webapp in Firefly.

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We have set up a collaboration with Prosa, who generously offered to provide a location for our regular meetups. Please see Prosa's Calendar for more details: Prosa Calendar (https://www.prosa.dk/kalender/hele-kalenderen/)

The ADA meeting room fits about 25 people and if we need more space, we can use the canteen (PASCAL), which has a capacity of at most 50 (fire regulation).