There’s a history of rich debate and discussion on these issues coming from the scheme world, where it takes the guise of implementing unwind-protect in the presence of call/cc. Kent Pitman’s take is presented here: http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PFAQ/unwind-protect-vs-continuations-overview.ht... There’s some context given in the following ltu discussion: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2966 Will Clinger’s notes on his revised implementation are particularly useful: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/will/UWESC/uwesc.sch Note that none of the implementations translate directly, I think, as they rely on top-level mutable state. In any case, my take is the following -- first, remove the ContT instance from the CatchIO package as it is obviously wrong. Next, don’t use ContT in the presence of exceptions. There are few cases where one really needs to do so, given that exceptions provide a powerful means of flow control themselves. Finally, it is much easier to provide a bracket function with one-shot continuations (i.e., MonadExit), and doing so could well simplify most of the current uses of ContT. Cheers, Sterl