116 research outputs found
Benefits of Session Types for software Development
Session types are a formalism used to specify and check the correctness of communication based systems. Within their scope, they can guarantee the absence of communication errors such as deadlock, sending an unexpected message or failing to handle an incoming message. Introduced over two decades ago, they have developed into a significant theme in programming languages. In this paper we examine the beliefs that drive research into this area and make it popular. We look at the claims and motivation behind session types throughout the literature. We identify the hypotheses upon which session types have been designed and implemented, and attempt to clarify and formulate them in a more suitable manner for testing
Recursive Session Types Revisited
Session types model structured communication-based programming. In
particular, binary session types for the pi-calculus describe communication
between exactly two participants in a distributed scenario. Adding sessions to
the pi-calculus means augmenting it with type and term constructs. In a
previous paper, we tried to understand to which extent the session constructs
are more complex and expressive than the standard pi-calculus constructs. Thus,
we presented an encoding of binary session pi-calculus to the standard typed
pi-calculus by adopting linear and variant types and the continuation-passing
principle. In the present paper, we focus on recursive session types and we
present an encoding into recursive linear pi-calculus. This encoding is a
conservative extension of the former in that it preserves the results therein
obtained. Most importantly, it adopts a new treatment of the duality relation,
which in the presence of recursive types has been proven to be quite
challenging.Comment: In Proceedings BEAT 2014, arXiv:1408.556
A type checking algorithm for qualified session types
We present a type checking algorithm for establishing a session-based
discipline in the pi calculus of Milner, Parrow and Walker. Our session types
are qualified as linear or unrestricted. Linearly typed communication channels
are guaranteed to occur in exactly one thread, possibly multiple times;
afterwards they evolve as unrestricted channels. Session protocols are
described by a type constructor that denotes the two ends of one and the same
communication channel. We ensure the soundness of the algorithm by showing that
processes consuming all linear resources are accepted by a type system
preserving typings during the computation and that type checking is consistent
w.r.t. structural congruence.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2011, arXiv:1108.208
Type systems for distributed programs: session communication
Distributed systems are everywhere around us and guaranteeing their correctness is of paramount importance. It is natural to expect that these systems interact and communicate among them to achieve a common task.
In this work, we develop techniques based on types and type systems for the verification of correctness, consistency and safety properties related to communication in complex distributed systems. We study advanced safety properties related to communication, like deadlock or lock freedom and progress. We study session types in the pi-calculus describing distributed systems and communication-centric computation. Most importantly, we de- fine an encoding of the session pi-calculus into the standard typed pi-calculus in order to understand the expressive power of these concurrent calculi. We show how to derive in the session pi-calculus basic properties, like type safety or complex ones, like progress, by exploiting this encoding
Affine Sessions
Session types describe the structure of communications implemented by
channels. In particular, they prescribe the sequence of communications, whether
they are input or output actions, and the type of value exchanged. Crucial to
any language with session types is the notion of linearity, which is essential
to ensure that channels exhibit the behaviour prescribed by their type without
interference in the presence of concurrency. In this work we relax the
condition of linearity to that of affinity, by which channels exhibit at most
the behaviour prescribed by their types. This more liberal setting allows us to
incorporate an elegant error handling mechanism which simplifies and improves
related works on exceptions. Moreover, our treatment does not affect the
progress properties of the language: sessions never get stuck
On the preciseness of subtyping in session types
Subtyping in concurrency has been extensively studied since early 1990s as one of the most interesting issues in type theory. The correctness of subtyping relations has been usually provided as the soundness for type safety. The converse direction, the completeness, has been largely ignored in spite of its usefulness to define the greatest subtyping relation ensuring type safety. This paper formalises preciseness (i.e. both soundness and completeness) of subtyping for mobile processes and studies it for the synchronous and the asynchronous session calculi. We first prove that the well-known session subtyping, the branching-selection subtyping, is sound and complete for the synchronous calculus. Next we show that in the asynchronous calculus, this subtyping is incomplete for type-safety: that is, there exist session types T and S such that T can safely be considered as a subtype of S, but T ≤ S is not derivable by the subtyping. We then propose an asynchronous sub-typing system which is sound and complete for the asynchronous calculus. The method gives a general guidance to design rigorous channel-based subtypings respecting desired safety properties
Session Types in a Linearly Typed Multi-Threaded Lambda-Calculus
We present a formalization of session types in a multi-threaded
lambda-calculus (MTLC) equipped with a linear type system, establishing for the
MTLC both type preservation and global progress. The latter (global progress)
implies that the evaluation of a well-typed program in the MTLC can never reach
a deadlock. As this formulated MTLC can be readily embedded into ATS, a
full-fledged language with a functional programming core that supports both
dependent types (of DML-style) and linear types, we obtain a direct
implementation of session types in ATS. In addition, we gain immediate support
for a form of dependent session types based on this embedding into ATS.
Compared to various existing formalizations of session types, we see the one
given in this paper is unique in its closeness to concrete implementation. In
particular, we report such an implementation ready for practical use that
generates Erlang code from well-typed ATS source (making use of session types),
thus taking great advantage of the infrastructural support for distributed
computing in Erlang.Comment: This is the original version of the paper on supporting programming
with dyadic session types in AT
Linearly Typed Dyadic Group Sessions for Building Multiparty Sessions
Traditionally, each party in a (dyadic or multiparty) session implements
exactly one role specified in the type of the session. We refer to this kind of
session as an individual session (i-session). As a generalization of i-session,
a group session (g-session) is one in which each party may implement a group of
roles based on one channel. In particular, each of the two parties involved in
a dyadic g-session implements either a group of roles or its complement. In
this paper, we present a formalization of g-sessions in a multi-threaded
lambda-calculus (MTLC) equipped with a linear type system, establishing for the
MTLC both type preservation and global progress. As this formulated MTLC can be
readily embedded into ATS, a full-fledged language with a functional
programming core that supports both dependent types (of DML-style) and linear
types, we obtain a direct implementation of linearly typed g-sessions in ATS.
The primary contribution of the paper lies in both of the identification of
g-sessions as a fundamental building block for multiparty sessions and the
theoretical development in support of this identification.Comment: This paper can be seen as the pre-sequel to classical linear
multirole logic (CLML). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1603.0372
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