frank-lang

frank

Haskell2020–2025

frank-lang / frank

frank

Frank compiler

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What it is

Frank compiler

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No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

I highly recommend Oleg Kiselyov's talk titled "Having an Effect"[0] in which he talks about - purely functional model of computation and its pitfalls - Actor model, effectful…

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

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Observed mentions: 2020-11-22 16:20:24 UTC to 2025-11-20 22:58:54 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	3
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

6 sources

Twey·Nov 20, 2025

As far as I know the shiniest implementations in the effect typing world at the moment are Koka and Effekt, which are both languages in their own right. They each have their own ideas about implementation to make effects (mostly) zero-cost. https://koka-lang.github.io/ https://effekt-lang.org/ Frank is pretty old now but perhaps a simpler implementation: https://github.com/frank-lang/frank

In Freer Monads, More Extensible Effects (2015) [pdf]

animaomnium·Apr 2, 2024

For the curious, "do be do be do" is a seminal paper in the literature on algebraic effects that introduces frank, quirky little language that has algebraic effects but not handlers, at least in the traditional sense. Traditionally, an effect handler is an interpreter for a stream of commands, conforming to a specific interface. Generally, handlers surface in languages as a sort of generalized try/catch mechanism, that receive a "callback" to resume the "exception" that produced the command. In frank, not so. Frank is based around the idea of operators, which generalize functions with the capability of interpreting multiple streams of commands. A plain function can be seen, in fact, as the special case of an operator that interprets no commands. Operators are organized around ports and pegs. Pegs are the set of side effects that a computa

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tion needs. Each port is an offer to extend that set for downstream callers. Instead of building up a union of effects that each function needs, Frank propogated ambient ability inwards. Operators can then be composed based on the ports and pegs they offer. operator: <port>X → [peg]Y This works partially because operators are shallow handlers and not deep handlers. Handlers interpret commands: if the handler itself is in scope when interpreting a command, then the language is said to have deep handlers. Frank has shallow handlers, meaning that commands are interpreted in an environment without the handling operator present. Shallow handlers give greater control to the programmer with respect to how commands are interpreted: operators can propagate ambient ability, or choose not to. (This is a bad explanation because you already need to know what I'm talking about to understand what I'm talking about, but oh well.) My one critism of frank is that the effect model is kinda hard for the working programmer to understand. I can explain Koka effects as "exceptions plus multiple resumption". I don't really have a categorical phrase for frank, and that's its innovation. This isn't so much a criticism but a plea for the pedagogical ramp to this research to improve. do be do be do. If you're still curious, check out the compiler github repo: https://github.com/frank-lang/frank And if anything is wrong in the above explanation, please correct me, because we all benefit from Cunningham's Law in the end. Allow me to be the fool.

In Do be do be do (2017) [pdf]

saityi·Nov 19, 2021

How does this compare to other effect-oriented languages like Koka, Frank, and Eff? I've been doing some work with Koka lately, but I briefly looked into the other three (including Effekt) and it mostly came down to, 'Koka seems most active in development'[1] and 'Koka had the easiest to use documentation for me'[2], which are both kind of subjective ways of choosing between them rather than an objective comparison. [1] E.g. https://github.com/effekt-lang/effekt had its last commit back in June; https://github.com/frank-lang/frank last commit last year; but https://github.com/koka-lang/koka last update was Oct 15. Effekt seems semi-active, at least, compared to Frank. While stability is good, I wouldn't expect it in a language actively being used for research. [2] Comparing https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/book.html and https://effekt

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-lang.org/docs/ and https://www.eff-lang.org/learn/

In Effekt – A research language with effect handlers and lightweight polymorphism

ithkuil·Aug 28, 2021

Frank: https://github.com/frank-lang/frank

In The problem of effects in Rust (2020)

ithkuil·Jul 29, 2021

Frank is also interesting https://github.com/frank-lang/frank https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.09259

In Extensible Effects in the van Laarhoven Free Monad

siraben·Nov 22, 2020Recommendation phrase

I highly recommend Oleg Kiselyov's talk titled "Having an Effect"[0] in which he talks about - purely functional model of computation and its pitfalls - Actor model, effectful programming with requests and responses and an implementation in Haskell. - denotational semantics and combining effects. Once you have a model of your language, what if you want to extend it by adding another effect? It forces you to rewrite the semantics (and thus any interpreter of your language) completely. Taking using the effects-as-requests viewpoint, only the request and handler for an effect needs to be added or changed, and the rest untouched. This is known as "stable denotations". - really evaluating what it means for an expression to be pure or effectful. Even variable reference should be considered an effect. - different scoping rules in lambda calcu

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lus can be expressed in terms of effects! Creating a dynamic closure is not effectful, though applying it usually is, OTOH, creating a lexical closure is effectful but using it is not. I think Haskell provides a good example of how a purely functional language can still express effectful computation. through a monadic interface. Though monad transformers have their share of problems when heavily nested (n^2 instances, performance), various effect system libraries are gaining traction.[2] On the bleeding edge of research there's languages like Frank[1] where the effect system is pervasive throughout the language. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhERMBT7u4w [1] https://github.com/frank-lang/frank [2] Implementing free monads from scratch, https://siraben.github.io/2020/02/20/free-monads.html

In Exotic Programming Ideas, Part 3: Effect Systems