Work

Lightweight Session Programming in Scala

Year: 2016

Type: article

Abstract: Designing, developing and maintaining concurrent applications is an error-prone and time-consuming task; most difficulties arise because compilers are usually unable to check whether the inputs/outputs performed by a program at runtime will adhere to a given protocol specification. To address this problem, we propose lightweight session programming in Scala: we leverage the native features of the Scala type system and standard library, to introduce (1) a representation of session types as Scala types, and (2) a library, called lchannels, with a convenient API for session-based programming, supporting local and distributed communication. We generalise the idea of Continuation-Passing Style Protocols (CPSPs), studying their formal relationship with session types. We illustrate how session programming can be carried over in Scala: how to formalise a communication protocol, and represent it using Scala classes and lchannels, letting the compiler help spotting protocol violations. We attest the practicality of our approach with a complex use case, and evaluate the performance of lchannels with a series of benchmarks.

Source: DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics)

DOI: 10.4230/lipics.ecoop.2016.21

Authors: Scalas, Alceste, Yoshida, Nobuko

Institutions: University of Cagliari, Imperial College London

Language: English

Topic: Logic, programming, and type systems

Subfield: Software

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Awards: From Data Types to Session Types---A Basis for Concurrency and Distribution, Conversation-Based Governance for Distributed Systems by Multiparty Session Types, Exploiting Parallelism through Type Transformations for Hybrid Manycore Systems