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Model-View-Update-Communicate: Session Types Meet the Elm Architecture

Author Simon Fowler

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Simon Fowler
  • University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Funding

This work was supported by ERC Consolidator Grant Skye (grant no. 682315) and an ISCF Metrology Fellowship grant provided by the UK government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

Acknowledgements

I thank Jake Browning for sparking my interest in Elm and for his help with an early prototype of the Links MVU library; Sára Decova for a previous version of the multi-room chat server example; Sam Lindley for many useful discussions and suggestions; and James Cheney, April Gonçalves, and the anonymous ECOOP PC and AEC reviewers for detailed comments.

Cite As Get BibTex

Simon Fowler. Model-View-Update-Communicate: Session Types Meet the Elm Architecture. In 34th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 166, pp. 14:1-14:28, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2020.14

Abstract

Session types are a type discipline for communication channel endpoints which allow conformance to protocols to be checked statically. Safely implementing session types requires linearity, usually in the form of a linear type system. Unfortunately, linear typing is difficult to integrate with graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and to date most programs using session types are command line applications.
In this paper, we propose the first principled integration of session typing and GUI development by building upon the Model-View-Update (MVU) architecture, pioneered by the Elm programming language. We introduce λMVU, the first formal model of the MVU architecture, and prove it sound. By extending λMVU with commands as found in Elm, along with linearity and model transitions, we show the first formal integration of session typing and GUI programming. We implement our approach in the Links web programming language, and show examples including a two-factor authentication workflow and multi-room chat server.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Concurrent programming languages
Keywords
  • Session types
  • concurrent programming
  • Model-View-Update

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