Typing actors using behavioural types

The actor model of computation assists and disciplines the development of concurrent programs by forcing the software engineer to reason about high-level concurrency abstractions. While this leads to a better handling of concurrency-related issues, the model itself does not exclude erratic program behaviours. In this paper we consider the actor model and investigate a type-based static analysis to identify actor systems which may behave erraticly during runtime. We consider the notion of behavioural types and consider issues related to the nature of the actor model including non-determinism, multi-party communication, dynamic actor spawning, non-finite computation and a possibly changing communication topology, which we contrast with existing works.peer-reviewe

PLACES'10: The 3rd Workshop on Programmng Language Approaches to concurrency and Communication-Centric Software

Paphos, Cyprus. March 201

Session types in practical programming

Programs are more distributed and concurrent today than ever before, and structural communications are at the core. Constructing and debugging such programs are hard due to the lack of formal specifications and verifications of concurrency. Recent advances in type systems allow us to specify the structures of communications as session types, thus enabling static type checking of the usages of communication channels against protocols. The soundness of session type systems implies communication fidelity and absence of deadlock. This work proposes to formalize multiparty dependent session types as an expressive and practical type discipline for enforcing communication protocols. The type system is formulated in the setting of multi-threaded λ-calculus with inspirations from multirole logic. It is sound, and it provides linearity and coherence guarantees entirely statically. The type system supports recursion and polymorphism. The formulation is particularly suitable for practical implementation, and this work provides such a runtime implementation

On Global Types and Multi-Party Session

Global types are formal specifications that describe communication protocols in terms of their global interactions. We present a new, streamlined language of global types equipped with a trace-based semantics and whose features and restrictions are semantically justified. The multi-party sessions obtained projecting our global types enjoy a liveness property in addition to the traditional progress and are shown to be sound and complete with respect to the set of traces of the originating global type. Our notion of completeness is less demanding than the classical ones, allowing a multi-party session to leave out redundant traces from an underspecified global type. In addition to the technical content, we discuss some limitations of our language of global types and provide an extensive comparison with related specification languages adopted in different communities

Life of occam-Pi

This paper considers some questions prompted by a brief review of the history of computing. Why is programming so hard? Why is concurrency considered an “advanced” subject? What’s the matter with Objects? Where did all the Maths go? In searching for answers, the paper looks at some concerns over fundamental ideas within object orientation (as represented by modern programming languages), before focussing on the concurrency model of communicating processes and its particular expression in the occam family of languages. In that focus, it looks at the history of occam, its underlying philosophy (Ockham’s Razor), its semantic foundation on Hoare’s CSP, its principles of process oriented design and its development over almost three decades into occam-? (which blends in the concurrency dynamics of Milner’s ?-calculus). Also presented will be an urgent need for rationalisation – occam-? is an experiment that has demonstrated significant results, but now needs time to be spent on careful review and implementing the conclusions of that review. Finally, the future is considered. In particular, is there a future

Causal Consistency for Reversible Multiparty Protocols

In programming models with a reversible semantics, computational steps can be undone. This paper addresses the integration of reversible semantics into process languages for communication-centric systems equipped with behavioral types. In prior work, we introduced a monitors-as-memories approach to seamlessly integrate reversible semantics into a process model in which concurrency is governed by session types (a class of behavioral types), covering binary (two-party) protocols with synchronous communication. The applicability and expressiveness of the binary setting, however, is limited. Here we extend our approach, and use it to define reversible semantics for an expressive process model that accounts for multiparty (n-party) protocols, asynchronous communication, decoupled rollbacks, and abstraction passing. As main result, we prove that our reversible semantics for multiparty protocols is causally-consistent. A key technical ingredient in our developments is an alternative reversible semantics with atomic rollbacks, which is conceptually simple and is shown to characterize decoupled rollbacks.Comment: Extended, revised version of a PPDP'17 paper (https://doi.org/10.1145/3131851.3131864

Flexible quantum circuits using scalable continuous-variable cluster states

We show that measurement-based quantum computation on scalable continuous-variable (CV) cluster states admits more quantum-circuit flexibility and compactness than similar protocols for standard square-lattice CV cluster states. This advantage is a direct result of the macronode structure of these states---that is, a lattice structure in which each graph node actually consists of several physical modes. These extra modes provide additional measurement degrees of freedom at each graph location, which can be used to manipulate the flow and processing of quantum information more robustly and with additional flexibility that is not available on an ordinary lattice.Comment: (v2) consistent with published version; (v1) 11 pages (9 figures

Guppy: Process-Oriented Programming on Embedded Devices

Guppy is a new and experimental process-oriented programming language, taking much inspiration (and some code-base) from the existing occam-pi language. This paper reports on a variety of aspects related to this, specifically language, compiler and run-time system development, enabling Guppy programs to run on desktop and embedded systems. A native code-generation approach is taken, using C as the intermediate language, and with stack-space requirements determined at compile-time