Session Type Inference in Haskell

Theoretical Computer Science, 2006

We define a language whose type system, incorporating session types, allows complex protocols to be specified by types and verified by static typechecking. A session type, associated with a communication channel, specifies the state transitions of a protocol and also the data types of messages associated with transitions; thus typechecking can verify both correctness of individual messages and correctness of sequences of transitions. Previously, session types have mainly been studied in the context of the π-calculus; instead, our formulation is based on a multi-threaded functional language with side-effecting input/output operations. Our typing judgements statically describe dynamic changes in the types of channels, and our function types not only specify argument and result types but also describe changes in channels. We formalize the syntax, semantics and type checking system of our language, and prove subject reduction and runtime type safety theorems.

2003

We define a language whose type system, incorporating session types, allows complex protocols to be specified by types and verified by static typechecking. Although session types are well understood in the context of the π-calculus, our formulation is based on λ-calculus with side-effecting input/output operations and is different in significant ways. Our typing judgements statically describe dynamic changes in the types of channels, our channel types statically track aliasing, and our function types not only specify argument and result types but also describe changes in channel types. After formalising the syntax, semantics and typing rules of our language, and proving a subject reduction theorem, we outline some possibilities for adding references, objects and concurrency.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010

We illustrate the concepts of sessions and session types as they have been developed in the setting of the π-calculus. Motivated by the goal of obtaining a formalisation closer to existing standards and aiming at their enhancement and strengthening, several extensions of the original core system have been proposed, which we survey together with the embodying of sessions into functional and object-oriented languages, as well as some implementations.

ArXiv, 2021

Theories and tools based on multiparty session types offer correctness guarantees for concurrent programs that communicate using message-passing. These guarantees usually come at the cost of an intrinsically top-down approach, which requires the communication behaviour of the entire program to be specified as a global type. This paper introduces kmclib: an OCaml library that supports the development of correct message-passing programs without having to write any types. The library utilises the meta-programming facilities of OCaml to automatically infer the session types of concurrent programs and verify their compatibility (k-MC [13]). Well-typed programs, written with kmclib, do not lead to communication errors and cannot get stuck.

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, 2012

Distributed applications and services have become pervasive in our society due to the widespread use of internet and mobile devices. There are urgent demands to efficiently ensure safety and correctness of such software. A session-type system is a framework to statically check whether communication descriptions conform to certain protocols. They are shown to be effective yet simple enough to fit in harmony with existing programming languages. In the original session type system, the subject reduction property does not hold. This paper establishes a conservative extension of the original session type system with the subject reduction property. Finally, it is also shown that our typing rule properly extends the set of typeable processes.

Traditional static typing systems for the pi-calculus are built around capability types that control the read/write access rights on channels and describe the type of their payload. While static typing has proved adequate for reasoning on process behavior in typed contexts, dynamic techniques have often been advocated as more effective for access control in distributed/untyped contexts. Here we develop a new typing discipline for the asynchronous pi-calculus, which we call API@. It combines static and dynamic typing: a static type system associates channels with flat types that only express read/write capabilities and disregard the payload type; a dynamically typed synchronization complements the static type system to guarantee type soundness. We define a typed equational theory, and we give a co-inductive proof technique useful to prove equivalences among processes. We study the relationships between our dynamic approach and the static one of the asynchronous pi calculuS, referred as API, which comes with an entirely standard static typing system. On the one hand, we show that API can be encoded in API@ in a sound manner. On the other hand, we show that API@ can be encoded into API in a fully abstract manner, preserving the respective behavioral equivalences of the two calculi. Besides yielding an interesting expressivity result, the encoding also sheds light on the effectiveness of dynamic typing as a mechanism for access control. Here we take P ∼ = @ Q to mean that P and Q are behaviorally indistinguishable, i.e. they have the same observable behavior when executed in any arbitrary context. The equation (1) is easily disproved by exhibiting a context that interferes with the intended protocol between S and C. A first example is the context C 1 [−] = − | d(x).!x(y).0, that initially behaves as the client, to receive s, but then it steals the jobs intended Work partially supported by M.I.U.R (Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research) under contract n. 2005015785.

Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science, 2017

The classes of depth-bounded and name-bounded processes are fragments of the π-calculus for which some of the decision problems that are undecidable for the full calculus become decidable. P is depth-bounded at level k if every reduction sequence for P contains successor processes with at most k active nested restrictions. P is name-bounded at level k if every reduction sequence for P contains successor processes with at most k active bound names. Membership of these classes of processes is undecidable. In this paper we use binary session types to decise two type systems that give a sound characterization of the properties: If a process is well-typed in our first system, it is depth-bounded. If a process is well-typed in our second, more restrictive type system, it will also be name-bounded.

2019

Session types are a type-based approach to the verification of message-passing programs. They have been much studied as type systems for the pi-calculus and for languages such as Java. A session type specifies what and when should be exchanged through a channel. Central to session-typed languages are constructs in types and processes that specify sequencing in protocols. Here we study minimal session types, session types without sequencing. This is arguably the simplest form of session types. By relying on a core process calculus with sessions and higher-order concurrency (abstraction passing), we prove that every process typable with usual (non minimal) session types can be compiled down into a process typed with minimal session types. This means that having sequencing constructs in both processes and session types is redundant; only sequentiality in processes is indispensable, as it can precisely codify sequentiality in types. Our developments draw inspiration from work by Parrow ...

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

A session takes place between two parties; after establishing a connection, each party interleaves local computations and communications (sending or receiving) with the other. Session types characterise such sessions in terms of the types of values communicated and the shape of protocols, and have been developed for the π-calculus, CORBA interfaces, and functional languages. We study the incorporation of session types into object-oriented languages through MOOSE, a multi-threaded language with session types, thread spawning, iterative and higher-order sessions. Our design aims to consistently integrate the objectoriented programming style and sessions, and to be able to treat various case studies from the literature. We describe the design of MOOSE, its syntax, operational semantics and type system, and develop a type inference system. After proving subject reduction, we establish the progress property: once a communication has been established, well-typed programs will never starve at communication points.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004

We define a language whose type system, incorporating session types, allows complex protocols to be specified by types and verified by static typechecking. A session type, associated with a communication channel, specifies the state transitions of a protocol and also the data types of messages associated with transitions; thus typechecking can verify both correctness of individual messages and correctness of sequences of transitions. Previously session types have mainly been studied in the context of the π-calculus; instead, our formulation is based on a multi-threaded functional language with side-effecting input/output operations. Our typing judgements statically describe dynamic changes in the types of channels, our channel types statically track aliasing, and our function types not only specify argument and result types but also describe changes in channels. We formalize the syntax, semantics and typing rules of our language, and prove subject reduction and runtime type safety theorems.

We propose session-ocaml, a novel library for session-typed concurrent/distributed programming in OCaml. Our technique solely relies on parametric polymorphism, which can encode core session type structures with strong static guarantees. Our key ideas are: () polarised session types, which give an alternative formulation of duality enabling OCaml to automatically infer an appropriate session type in a session with a reasonable notational overhead; and () a parameterised monad with a data structure called 'slots' manipulated with lenses, which can statically enforce session linearity and delegations. We show applications of session-ocaml including a travel agency usecase and an SMTP protocol.

Acta Informatica, 2005

We propose a new type system for information flow analysis for the π-calculus. As demonstrated by recent studies, information about whether each communication succeeds is important for precise information flow analysis for concurrent programs. By collecting such information using ideas of our previous type systems for deadlock/livelock-freedom, our type system can perform more precise analysis for certain communication/synchronization patterns (like synchronization using locks) than previous type systems. Our type system treats a wide range of communication/synchronization primitives in a uniform manner, which enabled development of a clear proof of type soundness and a sound and complete type inference algorithm.

The more expressive a type system, the more type infor- mation has to be provided in a program. Having to provide a type is sometimes a pain, but lacking expressivity is often even worse. There is a continuous struggle between expressivity and (type-)verbosity. How- ever, even very expressive type systems allow type inference for parts of a program. Generic Haskell is an extension of Haskell that supports defin- ing generic functions. Generic Haskell assumes that the type of a generic function is explicitly specified. This is often no problem, but sometimes it is rather painful to have to specify a type - in particular for generic functions with many dependencies - and sometimes the specified type can be generalized. In this paper, we identify three type inference prob- lems specific to generic functions, and present (partial) solutions to each of them.

Proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming - PPDP '14, 2014

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 subtyping 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.

The more expressive a type system, the more type information has to be provided in a program. Having to provide a type is sometimes a pain, but lacking expressivity is often even worse. There is a continuous struggle between expressivity and (type-)verbosity. However, even very expressive type systems allow type inference for parts of a program. Generic Haskell is an extension of Haskell that supports defining generic functions. Generic Haskell assumes that the type of a generic function is explicitly specified. This is often no problem, but sometimes it is rather painful to have to specify a type -in particular for generic functions with many dependencies -and sometimes the specified type can be generalized. In this paper, we identify three type inference problems specific to generic functions, and present (partial) solutions to each of them.