Effect handlers allow the programmer to implement computational effects, such as custom error handling, various forms of lightweight concurrency, and dynamic binding, inside the programming language. We introduce cpp-effects, a C++ library for effect handlers with a typed high-level, object-oriented interface. We demonstrate that effect handlers can be successfully applied in imperative systems programming languages with manual memory management. Through a collection of examples, we explore how to program effectively with effect handlers in C++, discuss the intricacies and challenges of the implementation, and show that despite its limitations, cpp-effects performance is competitive and in some cases even outperforms state-of-the-art approaches such as C++20 coroutines and the libmprompt library for multiprompt delimited control.

@article{paperbot1438,
  title = {High-level effect handlers in C++},
  author = {Dan Ghica and Sam Lindley and Marcos Maroñas Bravo and Maciej Piróg},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {6},
  number = {OOPSLA2},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.1145/3563445}
}