A number of members of the project, Mario Bravetti, Marco Carbone, Julien Lange, and Gianluigi Zavattaro, along with Nobuko Yoshida, have recently published a paper on asynchronous session subtyping at Concur 2019.

Abstract

Session types, types for structuring communication between endpoints in distributed systems, are recently being integrated into mainstream programming languages. In practice, a very important notion for dealing with such types is that of subtyping, since it allows for typing larger classes of system, where a program has not precisely the expected behavior but a similar one. Unfortunately, recent work has shown that subtyping for session types in an asynchronous setting is undecidable. To cope with such a negative result, the only approaches we are aware of either restrict the syntax of session types or limit communication (by considering forms of bounded asynchrony). Both approaches are too restrictive in practice, hence we proceed differently by presenting an algorithm for checking subtyping which is sound, but not complete (in some cases it terminates without returning a decisive verdict). The algorithm is based on a tree representation of the coinductive definition of asynchronous subtyping; such a tree could be infinite, and the algorithm checks for the presence of finite witnesses of infinite successful subtrees. Furthermore, we provide a tool that implements our algorithm and we apply it to many examples that cannot be managed with the previous approaches.