Conflation Confers Concurrency

Publication Information

Robert Atkey, Sam Lindley, and J. Garrett Morris. Conflation Confers Concurrency. In Lindley, Sam, McBride, Conor, Trinder, Phil, and Sannella, Don, editors, A List of Successes That Can Change the World: Essays Dedicated to Philip Wadler on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 2016.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-30936-1_2

Abstract

Session types provide a static guarantee that concurrent programs respect communication protocols. Recent work has explored a correspondence between proof rules and cut reduction in linear logic and typing and evaluation of process calculi. This paper considers two approaches to extend logically-founded process calculi. First, we consider extensions of the process calculus to more closely resemble π-calculus. Second, inspired by denotational models of process calculi, we consider conflating dual types. Most interestingly, we observe that these approaches coincide: conflating the multiplicatives (⊗ and  ⅋) allows processes to share multiple channels; conflating the additives (⊕ and &) provides nondeterminism; and conflating the exponentials (! and ?) yields access points, a rendezvous mechanism for initiating session typed communication. Access points are particularly expressive: for example, they are sufficient to encode concurrent state and general recursion.