Behavioral Types in Programming Languages

Abstract

International audienceA recent trend in programming language research is to use behavioral type theory to ensure various correctness properties of largescale, 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 representation in a concrete programming language, to their integration with other programming constructs such as methods and functions, to design 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

Runtime Verification for Decentralised and Distributed Systems

“…While typed process frameworks for binary session types can analyse two-party protocols, more general type theories for multiparty session types cover the case of protocols with three or more participants (Honda et al [66]). Both binary and multiparty session types start to make their way into mainstream programming languages and frameworks (Ancona et al [2]). In the multiparty case, a global type entirely describes the intended communication scenario.…”

Explicit Connection Actions in Multiparty Session Types

“…Travel Agency is one of the widely-used examples in session types literature, based on a W3C Web services choreography use case; 1 we follow the version in [1]. The basic scenario starts by a Client (C) initiating a session with the Travel Agent (A) to negotiate a product quote.…”

Stateful Behavioral Types for Active Objects

“…If the callee is specified as being inactive (i.e., no process was running before and no postcondition is tracked ac(X 2 ) = ⊥), then only the receiving type is added by (2). When projecting on any other object, skip is added by (3). In any case, ac is updated and maps the callee to a new postcondition.…”

“…As Din and Owe [15] pointed out, it is non-trivial to precisely specify the communication within an object's heap memory from a global perspective [16]. Multiparty session types (short as MPST) [27], one important member of behavioral types [3,19], are established theories for typing globally stateless concurrent interactions (i.e., method calls) among multiple participants (i.e., objects) to ensure communication safety. Current works in MPST [6,38] have attempted to specify state in communication by using global values and assuming channels as the only communication concept.…”