Foundations of Session Types and Behavioural Contracts

Hans Hüttel (1) , Emilio Tuosto (2) , Hugo Torres Vieira (3) , Gianluigi Zavattaro (4, 5) , Ivan Lanese (4, 5) , Vasco T. Vasconcelos (6) , Luís Caires (6) , Marco Carbone (7) , Pierre-Malo Deniélou (8) , Dimitris Mostrous (6) , Luca Padovani (9, 10) , António Ravara (6)

1 AAU - Aalborg University [Denmark]
2 University of Leicester
3 IMT Institute for Advanced Studies [Lucca]
4 DISI - Department of Computer Science and Engineering [Bologna]
5 FOCUS - Foundations of Component-based Ubiquitous Systems
6 ULISBOA - Universidade de Lisboa = University of Lisbon
7 ITU - IT University of Copenhagen
8 RHUL - Royal Holloway [University of London]
9 Département de Radiothérapie
10 TIMONE - Hôpital de la Timone [CHU - APHM]

Behavioural type systems, usually associated to concurrent or distributed computations, encompass concepts such as interfaces, communication protocols, and contracts, in addition to the traditional input/output operations. The behavioural type of a software component specifies its expected patterns of interaction using expressive type languages, so that types can be used to determine automatically whether the component interacts correctly with other components. Two related important notions of behavioural types are those of session types and behavioural contracts. This paper surveys the main accomplishments of the last twenty years within these two approaches.

Mots clés: Behavioural types; Session types; Choreographies; Type systems

Domaines: Langage de programmation [cs.PL]; Théorie et langage formel [cs.FL]

Hans Hüttel, Emilio Tuosto, Hugo Torres Vieira, Gianluigi Zavattaro, Ivan Lanese, et al.. Foundations of Session Types and Behavioural Contracts. ACM Computing Surveys, 2016, 49 (1), ⟨10.1145/2873052⟩. ⟨hal-01336707⟩