Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Safe Session-Based Asynchronous Coordination in Rust

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Coordination Models and Languages (COORDINATION 2021)

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

Included in the following conference series:

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

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

References

  1. Introduction to Protocol Engineering. http://cs.uccs.edu/~cs522/pe/pe.htm. Accessed 19 Feb 2021

  2. Rumpsteak. https://github.com/zakcutner/rumpsteak

  3. \(\nu \)Scr. https://github.com/nuscr/nuscr

  4. Ancona, D., et al.: Behavioral types in programming languages. Found. Trends Program. Lang. 3(2–3), 95–230 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Bouajjani, A., Enea, C., Ji, K., Qadeer, S.: On the completeness of verifying message passing programs under bounded asynchrony. In: Chockler, H., Weissenbacher, G. (eds.) CAV 2018. LNCS, vol. 10982, pp. 372–391. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96142-2_23

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Bravetti, M., Carbone, M., Lange, J., Yoshida, N., Zavattaro, G.: A sound algorithm for asynchronous session subtyping. Leibniz Int. Proc. Inform. 140, 38:1–38:16 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Bravetti, M., Carbone, M., Zavattaro, G.: Undecidability of asynchronous session subtyping. Inf. Comput. 256, 300–320 (2017)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  8. Bravetti, M., Carbone, M., Zavattaro, G.: On the boundary between decidability and undecidability of asynchronous session subtyping. Theoret. Comput. Sci. 722, 19–51 (2018)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  9. Castro, D., Hu, R., Jongmans, S.S., Ng, N., Yoshida, N.: Distributed Programming Using Role-parametric Session Types in Go: Statically-typed Endpoint APIs for Dynamically-instantiated Communication Structures. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages 3(POPL), 29:1–29:30 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Castro-Perez, D., Yoshida, N.: CAMP: cost-aware multiparty session protocol. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 4(OOPSLA), 1–30 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Cutner, Z., Yoshida, N.: Safe session-based asynchronous coordination in rust. https://github.com/zakcutner/coordination-2021

  12. Donovan, R.: Why the developers who use rust love it so much (2020). https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/06/05/why-the-developers-who-use-rust-love-it-so-much/. Accessed 31 Jan 2021

  13. Gay, S., Ravara, A.: Behavioural Types: From Theory to Tools. River Publisher (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Ghilezan, S., Pantovic, J., Prokic, I., Scalas, A., Yoshida, N.: Precise subtyping for asynchronous multiparty sessions. In: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, POPL, vol. 5, pp. 16:1–16:28. ACM (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Heisler, B.: Criterion.rs. https://github.com/bheisler/criterion.rs

  16. Honda, K., Yoshida, N., Carbone, M.: Multiparty asynchronous session types. In: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, POPL, pp. 273–284. ACM (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Honda, K., Yoshida, N., Carbone, M.: Multiparty asynchronous session types. JACM 63, 1–67 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Hu, R., Yoshida, N.: Hybrid session verification through endpoint API generation. In: Stevens, P., Wąsowski, A. (eds.) FASE 2016. LNCS, vol. 9633, pp. 401–418. Springer, Heidelberg (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49665-7_24

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  19. Huang, H., Pillai, P., Shin, K.G.: Improving wait-free algorithms for interprocess communication in embedded real-time systems. In: 2002 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 02). USENIX Association (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Jespersen, T.B.L., Munksgaard, P., Larsen, K.F.: Session types for rust. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Generic Programming, WGP, pp. 13–22. ACM (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Kokke, W.: Rusty variation: deadlock-free sessions with failure in rust. Electron. Proc. Theoret. Comput. Sci. 304, 48–60 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Lagaillardie, N., Neykova, R., Yoshida, N.: Implementing multiparty session types in rust. In: Bliudze, S., Bocchi, L. (eds.) COORDINATION 2020. LNCS, vol. 12134, pp. 127–136. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50029-0_8

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  23. Lange, J., Yoshida, N.: On the undecidability of asynchronous session subtyping. In: Esparza, J., Murawski, A.S. (eds.) FoSSaCS 2017. LNCS, vol. 10203, pp. 441–457. Springer, Heidelberg (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54458-7_26

    Chapter  MATH  Google Scholar 

  24. Lange, J., Yoshida, N.: Verifying asynchronous interactions via communicating session automata. In: Dillig, I., Tasiran, S. (eds.) CAV 2019. LNCS, vol. 11561, pp. 97–117. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25540-4_6

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  25. Miu, A., Ferreira, F., Yoshida, N., Zhou, F.: Communication-safe web programming in typescript with routed multiparty session types. In: Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Compiler Construction, CC, pp. 94–106. ACM (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Neykova, R., Hu, R., Yoshida, N., Abdeljallal, F.: A session type provider: compile-time API generation of distributed protocols with refinements in F#. In: 27th International Conference on Compiler Construction, CC, pp. 128–138. ACM (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Scribble Authors: Scribble: Describing Multi Party Protocols (2015). http://www.scribble.org/

  28. The Rust Project Developers: Procedural Macros. https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/procedural-macros.html

  29. The Rust Survey Team: Rust Survey 2020 Results (2020). https://blog.rust-lang.org/2020/12/16/rust-survey-2020.html. Accessed 31 Jan 2021

  30. Tokio Contributors: Tokio. https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio

  31. Yoshida, N., Gheri, L.: A very gentle introduction to multiparty session types. In: Hung, D.V., D’Souza, M. (eds.) ICDCIT 2020. LNCS, vol. 11969, pp. 73–93. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36987-3_5

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  32. Yoshida, N., Hu, R., Neykova, R., Ng, N.: The scribble protocol language. In: Abadi, M., Lluch Lafuente, A. (eds.) TGC 2013. LNCS, vol. 8358, pp. 22–41. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05119-2_3

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  33. Zhou, F., Ferreira, F., Hu, R., Neykova, R., Yoshida, N.: Statically verified refinements for multiparty protocols. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 4(OOPSLA) (2020)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

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.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Zak Cutner & Nobuko Yoshida

Authors
  1. Zak Cutner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Nobuko Yoshida
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zak Cutner .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Ferruccio Damiani

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

    Ornela Dardha

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

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

Download citation

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

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-78141-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-78142-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Societies and partnerships

Search

Navigation