Abstract
Concurrent and distributed programming is notoriously hard. Modern languages and toolkits ease this difficulty by offering message-passing abstractions, such as actors (e.g., Erlang, Akka, Orleans) or processes (e.g., Go): they allow for simpler reasoning w.r.t. shared-memory concurrency, but do not ensure that a program implements a given specification. To address this challenge, it would be desirable to specify and verify the intended behaviour of message-passing applications using types, and ensure that, if a program type-checks and compiles, then it will run and communicate as desired. We develop this idea in theory and practice. We formalise a concurrent functional language λπ, with a new blend of behavioural types (from π-calculus theory), and dependent function types (from the Dotty programming language, a.k.a. the future Scala 3). Our theory yields four main payoffs: (1) it verifies safety and liveness properties of programs via typeś level model checking; (2) unlike previous work, it accurately verifies channel-passing (covering a typical pattern of actor programs) and higher-order interaction (i.e., sending/receiving mobile code); (3) it is directly embedded in Dotty, as a toolkit called Effpi, offering a simplified actor-based API; (4) it enables an efficient runtime system for Effpi, for highly concurrent programs with millions of processes/actors.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | PLDI 2019 - Proceedings of the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation |
Editors | Kathryn S. McKinley, Kathleen Fisher |
Publisher | ACM |
Pages | 502-516 |
Number of pages | 15 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450367127 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 8 Jun 2019 |
Event | 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI 2019 - Phoenix, United States Duration: 22 Jun 2019 → 26 Jun 2019 |
Conference
Conference | 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI 2019 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Phoenix |
Period | 22/06/19 → 26/06/19 |
Bibliographical note
© ACM, 2019. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.Keywords
- Actors
- Behavioural types
- Dependent types
- Dotty
- Model checking
- Processes
- Scala
- Temporal logic