Deadlock freedom is a crucial property for message-passing programs. Over the years, several different type systems for concurrent processes that ensure deadlock freedom have been proposed; this diversity raises the question of how they compare. We address this question, considering two type systems not covered in prior work: Kokke et al.’s HCP, a type system based on a linear logic with hypersequents, and Padovani’s priority-based type system for asynchronous processes, dubbed 𝖯. Their distinctive features make formal comparisons relevant and challenging. Our findings are two-fold: (1) the hypersequent setting does not drastically change the class of deadlock-free processes induced by linear logic, and (2) we relate the classes of deadlock-free processes induced by HCP and 𝖯. We prove that our results hold under both synchronous and asynchronous communication. Our results provide new insights into the essential mechanisms involved in statically avoiding deadlocks in concurrency.

Curry-Howard correspondences between Linear Logic (LL) and session types provide a firm foundation for concurrent processes. As the correspondences hold for intuitionistic and classical versions of LL (ILL and CLL), we obtain two different families of type systems for concurrency. An open question remains: how do these two families exactly relate to each other? Based upon a translation from CLL to ILL due to Laurent, we provide two complementary answers, in the form of full abstraction results based on a typed observational equivalence due to Atkey. Our results elucidate hitherto missing formal links between seemingly related yet different type systems for concurrency.

Session types are a well-established approach to communication correctness in message-passing processes. Widely studied from a process calculi perspective, here we pursue an unexplored strand and investigate the use of the Maude system for implementing session-typed process languages and reasoning about session-typed process specifications. We present four technical contributions. First, we develop and implement in Maude an executable specification of the operational semantics of a session-typed π-calculus by Vasconcelos. Second, we also develop an executable specification of its associated algorithmic type checking, and describe how both specifications can be integrated. Third, we show that our executable specification can be coupled with reachability and model checking tools in Maude to detect well-typed but deadlocked processes. Finally, we demonstrate the robustness of our approach by adapting it to a higher-order session π-calculus, in which exchanged values include names but also abstractions (functions from names to processes). All in all, our contributions define a promising new approach to the (semi)automated analysis of communication correctness in message-passing concurrency.