MobilityReadingGroup

π-calculus, Session Types research at Imperial College

Stay Safe under Panic: Affine Rust Programming with Multiparty Session Types
Nicolas LAGAILLARDIE, Rumyana NEYKOVA, Nobuko YOSHIDA
36th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2022). p. 4:1 - 4:29

Communicating systems comprise diverse software components across networks. To ensure their robustness, modern programming languages such as Rust provide both strongly typed channels, whose usage is guaranteed to be affine (at most once), and cancellation operations over binary channels. For coordinating components to correctly communicate and synchronise with each other, we use the structuring mechanism from multiparty session types, extending it with affine communication channels and implicit/explicit cancellation mechanisms. This new typing discipline, affine multiparty session types (AMPST), ensures cancellation termination of multiple, independently running components and guarantees that communication will not get stuck due to error or abrupt termination. Guided by AMPST, we implemented an automated generation tool (MultiCrusty) of Rust APIs associated with cancellation termination algorithms, by which the Rust compiler auto-detects unsafe programs. Our evaluation shows that MultiCrusty provides an efficient mechanism for communication, synchronisation, and propagation of the notifications of cancellation for arbitrary processes. We have implemented several usecases, including popular application protocols (OAuth, SMTP), and protocols with exception handling patterns (circuit breaker, distributed logging).

@inproceedings{LNY2022,
  author = {Nicolas Lagaillardie and Rumyana Neykova and Nobuko Yoshida},
  title = {{Stay Safe under Panic: Affine Rust Programming with Multiparty Session Types}},
  booktitle = {36th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming},
  series = {LIPIcs},
  volume = {222},
  pages = {4:1--4:29},
  publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum f{"u}r Informatik},
  year = 2022
}
@inproceedings{LNY2022,
  author = {Nicolas Lagaillardie and Rumyana Neykova and Nobuko Yoshida},
  title = {{Stay Safe under Panic: Affine Rust Programming with Multiparty Session Types}},
  booktitle = {36th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming},
  series = {LIPIcs},
  volume = {222},
  pages = {4:1--4:29},
  publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum f{"u}r Informatik},
  doi = "10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2022.4",
  year = 2022
}