Multiparty session types (MPST) provide a rigorous foundation for verifying the safety and liveness of concurrent systems. However, existing approaches often force a difficult trade-off: classical, projection-based techniques are compositional but limited in expressiveness, while more recent techniques achieve higher expressiveness by relying on non-compositional, whole-system model checking, which scales poorly. This paper introduces a new approach to MPST that delivers both expressiveness and compositionality, called the synthetic approach. Our key innovation is a type system that verifies each process directly against a global protocol specification, represented as a labelled transition system (LTS) in general, with global types as a special case. This approach uniquely avoids the need for intermediate local types and projection. We demonstrate that our approach, while conceptually simpler, supports a benchmark of challenging protocols that were previously beyond the reach of compositional techniques in the MPST literature. We generalise our type system, showing that it can validate processes against any specification that constitutes a “well-behaved” LTS, supporting protocols not expressible with the standard global type syntax. The entire framework, including all theorems and many examples, has been formalised and mechanised in Agda, and we have developed a prototype implementation as an extension to VS Code.

We design and implement Zooid, a domain specific language for certified multiparty communication, embedded in Coq and implemented atop our mechanisation framework of asynchronous multiparty session types (the first of its kind). Zooid provides a fully mechanised metatheory for the semantics of global and local types, and a fully verified end-point process language that faithfully reflects the type-level behaviours and thus inherits the global types properties such as deadlock freedom, protocol compliance, and liveness guarantees.

Building correct and efficient message-passing parallel programs still poses many challenges. The incorrect use of message-passing constructs can introduce deadlocks, and a bad task decomposition will not achieve good speedups. Current approaches focus either on correctness or efficiency, but limited work has been done on ensuring both. In this paper, we propose a new parallel programming framework, PAlg, which is a first-order language with participant annotations that ensures deadlock-freedom by construction. PAlg programs are coupled with an abstraction of their communication structure, a global type from the theory of multiparty session types (MPST). This global type serves as an output for the programmer to assess the efficiency of their achieved parallelisation. PAlg is implemented as an EDSL in Haskell, from which we: 1. compile to low-level message-passing C code; 2. compile to sequential C code, or interpret as sequential Haskell functions; and, 3. infer the communication protocol followed by the compiled message-passing program. We use the properties of global types to perform message reordering optimisations to the compiled C code. We prove the extensional equivalence of the compiled code, as well as protocol compliance. We achieve linear speedups on a shared-memory 12-core machine, and a speedup of 16 on a 2-node, 24-core NUMA.

Abstract Session types provide a principled programming discipline for structured interactions. They represent a wide spectrum of type-systems for concurrency. Their type safety is thus extremely important. EMTST is a tool to aid in representing and validating theorems about session types in the Coq proof assistant. On paper, these proofs are often tricky, and error prone. In proof assistants, they are typically long and difficult to prove. In this work, we propose a library that helps validate the theory of session types calculi in proof assistants. As a case study, we study two of the most used binary session types systems: we show the impossibility of representing the first system in $$\alpha $$ -equivalent representations, and we prove type preservation for the revisited system. We develop our tool in the Coq proof assistant, using locally nameless for binders and small scale reflection to simplify the handling of linear typing environments.

This paper presents CAMP, a new static performance analysis framework for message-passing concurrent and distributed systems, based on the theory of multiparty session types (MPST). Understanding the run-time performance of concurrent and distributed systems is of great importance for the identification of bottlenecks and optimisation opportunities. In the message-passing setting, these bottlenecks are generally communication overheads and synchronisation times. Despite its importance, reasoning about these intensional properties of software, such as performance, has received little attention, compared to verifying extensional properties, such as correctness. Behavioural protocol specifications based on sessions types capture not only extensional, but also intensional properties of concurrent and distributed systems. CAMP augments MPST with annotations of communication latency and local computation cost, defined as estimated execution times, that we use to extract cost equations from protocol descriptions. CAMP is also extendable to analyse asynchronous communication optimisation built on a recent advance of session type theories. We apply our tool to different existing benchmarks and use cases in the literature with a wide range of communication protocols, implemented in C, MPI-C, Scala, Go, and OCaml. Our benchmarks show that, in most of the cases, we predict an upper-bound on the real execution costs with < 15% error.

This paper presents a framework for the static specification and safe programming of message passing protocols where the number and kinds of participants are dynamically instantiated. We develop the first theory of distributed multiparty session types (MPST) to support parameterised protocols with indexed roles—our framework statically infers the different kinds of participants induced by a protocol definition as role variants, and produces decoupled endpoint projections of the protocol onto each variant. This enables safe MPST-based programming of the parameterised endpoints in distributed settings: each endpoint can be implemented separately by different programmers, using different techniques (or languages). We prove the decidability of role variant inference and well-formedness checking, and the correctness of projection. We implement our theory as a toolchain for programming such role-parametric MPST protocols in Go. Our approach is to generate API families of lightweight, protocol- and variant-specific type wrappers for I/O. The APIs ensure a well-typed Go endpoint program (by native Go type checking) will perform only compliant I/O actions w.r.t. the source protocol. We leverage the abstractions of MPST to support the specification and implementation of Go applications involving multiple channels, possibly over mixed transports (e.g., Go channels, TCP), and channel passing via a unified programming interface. We evaluate the applicability and run-time performance of our generated APIs using microbenchmarks and real-world applications.

The increasing importance of parallelism has motivated the creation of better abstractions for writing parallel software, including structured parallelism using nested algorithmic skeletons. Such approaches provide high-level abstractions that avoid common problems, such as race conditions, and often allow strong cost models to be defined. However, choosing a combination of algorithmic skeletons that yields good parallel speedups for a program on some specific parallel architecture remains a difficult task. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to simultaneously reason both about the costs of different parallel structures and about the semantic equivalences between them. This paper presents a new type-based mechanism that enables strong static reasoning about these properties. We exploit well-known properties of a very general recursion pattern, hylomorphisms, and give a denotational semantics for structured parallel processes in terms of these hylomorphisms. Using our approach, it is possible to determine formally whether it is possible to introduce a desired parallel structure into a program without altering its functional behaviour, and also to choose a version of that parallel structure that minimises some given cost model.