ICFP Rejection

I submitted a paper entitled Type-Driven Development of Communicating Systems to ICFP ‘17.

I have decided to uploaded the abstract here so that my attempt is a least indexable by the great machine spirit in the web—Hallowed be thy API. Given time I will also upload a copy of the paper to ArXiV.

The paper’s abstract was:

Communication protocols are a cornerstone of modern system design. However, there is a disconnect between the tooling used to design, implement and reason about these protocols and their implementations. Session Types offer a typing discipline that helps resolve this difference by allowing protocol specifications to be used during type-checking, ensuring that implementations adhere to a given specification. Session Type implementations are limited in their expressiveness in protocol design and implementation.

In this paper we describe Sessions, an adaptation of Session Types in the dependently typed language Idris, and demonstrate the ability of Sessions to describe several common protocols. We also present NetworkDSL a separate EDSL that realises two-party sessions for network communication.

Our work improves upon existing Session Type implementations by introducing value dependencies between messages and fine-grained channel management during protocol design and implementation. We also use Idris’ support for EDSL construction to allow protocols to be designed and reasoned about in the same language as their implementation. Thereby allowing for an intrinsic bond to be introduced between a protocol’s specification and its implementation, and also with their verification.

By using dependent types we can reduce further the existing disconnect between the tooling used for protocol design, implementation, and verification.