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Linear Promises: Towards Safer Concurrent Programming

Authors Ohad Rau, Caleb Voss, Vivek Sarkar

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Author Details

Ohad Rau
  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
Caleb Voss
  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
Vivek Sarkar
  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

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Ohad Rau, Caleb Voss, and Vivek Sarkar. Linear Promises: Towards Safer Concurrent Programming. In 35th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2021). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 194, pp. 13:1-13:27, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2021) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2021.13

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new type system based on linear typing, and show how it can be incorporated in a concurrent programming language to track ownership of promises. By tracking write operations on each promise, the language is able to guarantee exactly one write operation is ever performed on any given promise. This language thus precludes a number of common bugs found in promise-based programs, such as failing to write to a promise and writing to the same promise multiple times. We also present an implementation of the language, complete with an efficient type checking algorithm and high-level programming constructs. This language serves as a safer platform for writing high-level concurrent code.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Concurrent programming languages
  • Theory of computation → Operational semantics
  • Theory of computation → Type theory
Keywords
  • promises
  • type systems
  • linear typing
  • operational semantics
  • concurrency

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References

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