Safe Session-Based Asynchronous Coordination in Rust

Abstract

Rust is a popular systems language focused on performance and reliability, with an emphasis on providing "fearless concurrency". Message passing has become a widely-used pattern by Rust developers although the potential for communication errors leaves developing safe and concurrent applications an unsolved challenge. In this ongoing work, we use multiparty session types to provide safety guarantees such as deadlock-freedom by coordinating message-passing processes. In contrast to previous contributions [22,21,20], our implementation targets asynchronous applications using async/await code in Rust. Specifically, we incorporate asynchronous subtyping theory, which allows program optimisation through reordering input and output actions. We evaluate our ideas by developing several representative use cases from the literature and by taking microbenchmarks. We discuss our plans to support full API generation integrating asynchronous optimisations.

Multiparty Session Typing in Java, Deductively

“…Their approach does not address the issues in Section 1, though, whereas our approach does. Previous attempts to address the issue of "mixed static/dynamic checks" either target a programming language with a stronger type system (Rust) [22,8,23,9], or adopt callback-style APIs in the specific context of event-based programming [35,34]. In contrast, our approach does not rely on (the strength of) the type system of the targeted programming language, and it supports traditional procedural/object-oriented programming.…”

“…A premier approach to apply the MPST method in combination with mainstream programming languages is based on API generation (Figure 5); it is used in the majority of MPST tools, including Scribble [16,17], its extensions [32,5,25,22,8,23,9,27,35], StMungo [21], νScr [34], mpstpp [20], and Pompset [6]. The main ideas, first conceived by Deniélou/Hu/Yoshida and pursued in Scribble, follow two insights: (a) local types can be interpreted as deterministic finite automata (DFA) [10,11], where every transition models a send/receive action; (b) DFAs can be encoded as object-oriented application programming interfaces (API) [16,17], where classes and methods model states and transitions.…”

Session Fidelity for ElixirST: A Session-Based Type System for Elixir Modules

“…There have been several binary [17,19] and multiparty [6,20] session type implementations for Rust. These implementations exploit Rust's affine type system to guarantee that channels mirror the actions prescribed by a session type.…”