Behavioural Types for Heterogeneous Systems (Position Paper)

Fowler, S. , Haller, P., Kuhn, R., Lindley, S., Scalas, A. and Vasconcelos, V. T. (2024) Behavioural Types for Heterogeneous Systems (Position Paper). In: 15th Workshop on Programming Language Approaches to Concurrency and Communication-cEntric Software (PLACES 2024), Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, 06 April 2024, pp. 37-48. (doi: 10.4204/EPTCS.401.4)

Abstract

Behavioural types provide a promising way to achieve lightweight, language-integrated verification for communication-centric software. However, a large barrier to the adoption of behavioural types is that the current state of the art expects software to be written using the same tools and typing discipline throughout a system, and has little support for components over which a developer has no control. This position paper describes the outcomes of a working group discussion at Dagstuhl Seminar 24051 (Next-Generation Protocols for Heterogeneous Systems). We propose a methodology for integrating multiple behaviourally-typed components, written in different languages. Our proposed approach involves an extensible protocol description language, a session IR that can describe data transformations and boundary monitoring and which can be compiled into program-specific session proxies, and finally a session middleware to aid session establishment. We hope that this position paper will stimulate discussion on one of the most pressing challenges facing the widespread adoption of behavioural typing.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Additional Information: This work was supported by EPSRC grant EP/T014628/1 (STARDUST), Horizon Europe grant 101093006 (TaRDIS), Independent Research Fund Denmark RP-1 grant “Hyben”, Digital Futures Research Pairs Consolidator Project “PORTALS”, and UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship MR/T043830/1 (EHOP), FCT grant PTDC/CCI-COM/6453/2020 (SafeSessions), and the LASIGE Research Unit.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Fowler, Dr Simon
• Authors: Fowler, S., Haller, P., Kuhn, R., Lindley, S., Scalas, A., and Vasconcelos, V. T.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• ISSN: 2075-2180
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2024 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 401:37–48
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License

Related URLs

• Organisation

Project Code	Award No	Project Name	Principal Investigator	Funder's Name	Funder Ref	Lead Dept
306912		Session Types for Reliable Distributed Systems	Simon Gay	Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)	EP/T014628/1	Computing Science