Lightweight Session Programming in Scala

Authors Alceste Scalas, Nobuko Yoshida



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Alceste Scalas
Nobuko Yoshida

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Alceste Scalas and Nobuko Yoshida. Lightweight Session Programming in Scala. In 30th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2016). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 56, pp. 21:1-21:28, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2016)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2016.21

Abstract

Designing, developing and maintaining concurrent applications is an error-prone and time-consuming task; most difficulties arise because compilers are usually unable to check whether the inputs/outputs performed by a program at runtime will adhere to a given protocol specification. To address this problem, we propose lightweight session programming in Scala: we leverage the native features of the Scala type system and standard library, to introduce (1) a representation of session types as Scala types, and (2) a library, called lchannels, with a convenient API for session-based programming, supporting local and distributed communication. We generalise the idea of Continuation-Passing Style Protocols (CPSPs), studying their formal relationship with session types. We illustrate how session programming can be carried over in Scala: how to formalise a communication protocol, and represent it using Scala classes and lchannels, letting the compiler help spotting protocol violations. We attest the practicality of our approach with a complex use case, and evaluate the performance of lchannels with a series of benchmarks.
Keywords
  • session types
  • Scala
  • concurrency

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