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International Conference on Coordination Languages and Models

COORDINATION 2021: Coordination Models and Languages pp 80–89Cite as

Safe Session-Based Asynchronous Coordination in Rust

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNPSE,volume 12717)

Abstract

Rust is a popular systems language focused on performance and reliability, with an emphasis on providing “fearless concurrency”. Message passing has become a widely-used pattern by Rust developers although the potential for communication errors leaves developing safe and concurrent applications an unsolved challenge. In this ongoing work, we use multiparty session types to provide safety guarantees such as deadlock-freedom by coordinating message-passing processes. In contrast to previous contributions [20,21,22], our implementation targets asynchronous applications using / code in Rust. Specifically, we incorporate asynchronous subtyping theory, which allows program optimisation through reordering input and output actions. We evaluate our ideas by developing several representative use cases from the literature and by taking microbenchmarks. We discuss our plans to support full API generation integrating asynchronous optimisations.

Keywords

  • Rust
  • Asynchronous communication
  • Deadlock-freedom
  • Session types

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We use session type syntax [31] where ! and ? denote send and receive respectively.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Nicolas Lagaillardie and Fangyi Zhou for their helpful comments and suggestions. The work is supported by EPSRC, grants EP/T006544/1, EP/K011715/1, EP/K034413/1, EP/L00058X/1, EP/N027833/1, EP/N028201/1, EP/T014709/1, and EP/V000462/1 and by NCSS/EPSRC VeTSS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Zak Cutner & Nobuko Yoshida

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  1. Zak Cutner
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  2. Nobuko Yoshida
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Correspondence to Zak Cutner .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Ferruccio Damiani

  2. Sir Alwyn William Building, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Dr. Ornela Dardha

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Cutner, Z., Yoshida, N. (2021). Safe Session-Based Asynchronous Coordination in Rust. In: Damiani, F., Dardha, O. (eds) Coordination Models and Languages. COORDINATION 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12717. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78142-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78142-2_5

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