A Universal Session Type for Untyped Asynchronous Communication

Abstract

In the simply-typed lambda-calculus we can recover the full range of expressiveness of the untyped lambda-calculus solely by adding a single recursive type U = U -> U. In contrast, in the session-typed pi-calculus, recursion alone is insufficient to recover the untyped pi-calculus, primarily due to linearity: each channel just has two unique endpoints. In this paper, we show that shared channels with a corresponding sharing semantics (based on the language SILL_S developed in prior work) are enough to embed the untyped asynchronous pi-calculus via a universal shared session type U_S. We show that our encoding of the asynchronous pi-calculus satisfies operational correspondence and preserves observable actions (i.e., processes are weakly bisimilar to their encoding). Moreover, we clarify the expressiveness of SILL_S by developing an operationally correct encoding of SILL_S in the asynchronous pi-calculus