The Two State Solution: Native and Serializable Continuations in the PLT Web Server

One of the annoyance of the stateless Web application language that comes with the PLT Web Server is that you can't call third-party higher-order library procedures with arguments that try to capture serializable continuations. (I know, you try to do that all the time.) For example:

(build-list
 3
 (lambda (i)
   (call-with-serializable-current-continuation
    (lambda (k) (serialize k)))))

The problem is that the stateless language performs a transformation on your program to extract the continuations into a serializable representation. If you really need to do this, we've developed a compromise called "The Two State Solution": one state on the client and the other on the server. Only the third-party parts of the continuation (in this case, the code inside build-list) are stored on the server; everything else is shipped to the client. You just need to annotate your code slightly to indicate where the transition is:

(serial->native
 (build-list
  3
  (lambda (i)
    (native->serial
     (call-with-serializable-current-continuation
      (lambda (k) (serialize k)))))))

serial->native signals the transition to the third-party and native->serial signals the transition back.

It is still a little annoying to find when you've called these third-party higher-order library procedures with arguments that try to capture serializable continuations, so there's a simple macro that provides a transitioning wrapper for you:

(define-native (build-list/native _ ho) build-list)

expands to:

(define (build-list/native fst snd)
  (serial->native
   (build-list
    fst
    (lambda args
      (native->serial
       (apply snd args))))))

This new feature is documented in the online manual, of course.