License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2022.22
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-162501
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2022/16250/
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Chen, Ruo Fei ; Balzer, Stephanie ; Toninho, Bernardo

Ferrite: A Judgmental Embedding of Session Types in Rust

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LIPIcs-ECOOP-2022-22.pdf (1 MB)

Abstract

Session types have proved viable in expressing and verifying the protocols of message-passing systems. While message passing is a dominant concurrency paradigm in practice, real world software is written without session types. A limitation of existing session type libraries in mainstream languages is their restriction to linear session types, precluding application scenarios that demand sharing and thus aliasing of channel references. This paper introduces Ferrite, a shallow embedding of session types in Rust that supports both linear and shared sessions. The formal foundation of Ferrite constitutes the shared session type calculus SILL_?, which Ferrite encodes via a novel judgmental embedding technique. The fulcrum of the embedding is the notion of a typing judgment that allows reasoning about shared and linear resources to type a session. Typing rules are then encoded as functions over judgments, with a valid typing derivation manifesting as a well-typed Rust program. This Rust program generated by Ferrite serves as a certificate, ensuring that the application will proceed according to the protocol defined by the session type. The paper details the features and implementation of Ferrite and includes a case study on implementing Servo’s canvas component in Ferrite.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{chen_et_al:LIPIcs.ECOOP.2022.22,
  author =	{Chen, Ruo Fei and Balzer, Stephanie and Toninho, Bernardo},
  title =	{{Ferrite: A Judgmental Embedding of Session Types in Rust}},
  booktitle =	{36th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2022)},
  pages =	{22:1--22:28},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-225-9},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2022},
  volume =	{222},
  editor =	{Ali, Karim and Vitek, Jan},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2022/16250},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-162501},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2022.22},
  annote =	{Keywords: Session Types, Rust, DSL}
}

Keywords: Session Types, Rust, DSL
Collection: 36th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2022)
Issue Date: 2022
Date of publication: 23.06.2022
Supplementary Material: Software (ECOOP 2022 Artifact Evaluation approved artifact): https://doi.org/10.4230/DARTS.8.2.14

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