Multiparty session types, beyond duality

Multiparty Session Types (MPST) are a well-established typing discipline for message-passing processes interacting on sessions involving two or more participants. Session typing can ensure desirable properties: absence of communication errors and deadlocks, and protocol conformance. We propose a novel MPST theory based on a rely/guarantee typing system, that checks (1) the guaranteed behaviour of the process being typed, and (2) the relied upon behaviour of other processes. Crucially, our theory achieves type safety by enforcing a typing context liveness invariant throughout typing derivations. Unlike “classic” MPST works, our typing system does not depend on global session types, and does not use syntactic duality checks. As a result, our new theory can prove type safety for processes that implement protocols with complex inter-role dependencies, thus sidestepping an intrinsic limitation of “classic” MPST

Multiparty session types, beyond duality (Abstract)

Multiparty Session Types (MPST) are a well-established typing discipline for message-passing processes interacting on sessions involving two or more participants. Session typing can ensure desirable properties: absence of communication errors and deadlocks, and protocol conformance. However, existing MPST works provide a subject reduction result that is arguably (and sometimes, surprisingly) restrictive: it only holds for typing contexts with strong duality constraints on the interactions between pairs of participants. Consequently, many "intuitively correct" examples cannot be typed and/or cannot be proved type-safe. We illustrate some of these examples, and discuss the reason for these limitations. Then, we outline a novel MPST typing system that removes these restrictions

On duality relations for session types

Session types are a type formalism used to describe communication protocols over private session channels. Each participant in a binary session owns one endpoint of a session channel. A key notion is that of duality: the endpoints of a session channel should have dual session types in order to guarantee communication safety. Duality relations have been independently defined in different ways and different works, without considering their effect on the type system. In this paper we systematically study the existing duality relations and some new ones, and compare them in order to understand their expressiveness. The outcome is that those relations are split into two groups, one related to the na¨ıve inductive duality, and the other related to a notion of mutual compliance, which we borrow from the literature on contracts for web-services

Behavioral types in programming languages

A recent trend in programming language research is to use behav- ioral type theory to ensure various correctness properties of large- scale, communication-intensive systems. Behavioral types encompass concepts such as interfaces, communication protocols, contracts, and choreography. The successful application of behavioral types requires a solid understanding of several practical aspects, from their represen- tation in a concrete programming language, to their integration with other programming constructs such as methods and functions, to de- sign and monitoring methodologies that take behaviors into account. This survey provides an overview of the state of the art of these aspects, which we summarize as the pragmatics of behavioral types

A linear decomposition of multiparty sessions for safe distributed programming

Multiparty Session Types (MPST) is a typing discipline for message-passing distributed processes that can ensure properties such as absence of communication errors and deadlocks, and protocol conformance. Can MPST provide a theoretical foundation for concurrent and distributed programming in "mainstream" languages? We address this problem by (1) developing the first encoding of a full-fledged multiparty session π-calculus into linear π-calculus, and(2) using the encoding as the foundation of a practical toolchain for safe multiparty programming in Scala. Our encoding is type-preserving and operationally sound and complete. Crucially, it keeps the distributed choreographic nature of MPST, illuminating that the safety properties of multiparty sessions can be precisely represented with a decomposition into binary linear channels. Previous works have only studied the relation between (limited) multiparty and binary sessions via centralised orchestration means. We exploit these results to implement an automated generation of Scala APIs for multiparty sessions, abstracting existing libraries for binary communication channels. This allows multiparty systems to be safely implemented over binary message transports, as commonly found in practice. Our implementation is the first to support distributed multiparty delegation: Our encoding yields it for free, via existing mechanisms for binary delegation

A New Linear Logic for Deadlock-Free Session-Typed Processes

The π -calculus, viewed as a core concurrent programming language, has been used as the target of much research on type systems for concurrency. In this paper we propose a new type system for deadlock-free session-typed π -calculus processes, by integrating two separate lines of work. The first is the propositions-as-types approach by Caires and Pfenning, which provides a linear logic foundation for session types and guarantees deadlock-freedom by forbidding cyclic process connections. The second is Kobayashi’s approach in which types are annotated with priorities so that the type system can check whether or not processes contain genuine cyclic dependencies between communication operations. We combine these two techniques for the first time, and define a new and more expressive variant of classical linear logic with a proof assignment that gives a session type system with Kobayashi-style priorities. This can be seen in three ways: (i) as a new linear logic in which cyclic structures can be derived and a CYCLE -elimination theorem generalises CUT -elimination; (ii) as a logically-based session type system, which is more expressive than Caires and Pfenning’s; (iii) as a logical foundation for Kobayashi’s system, bringing it into the sphere of the propositions-as-types paradigm