Typing Copyless Message Passing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a calculus for copyless message passing with a linear type system based on session types, ensuring memory safety and communication correctness in process interactions.

Contribution

It develops a novel type system using an original variant of session types to prevent memory leaks and errors in copyless message passing processes.

Findings

Type system guarantees freedom from memory faults

Processes are free from memory leaks and communication errors

Linear type limitations are addressed with session types

Abstract

We present a calculus that models a form of process interaction based on copyless message passing, in the style of Singularity OS. The calculus is equipped with a type system ensuring that well-typed processes are free from memory faults, memory leaks, and communication errors. The type system is essentially linear, but we show that linearity alone is inadequate, because it leaves room for scenarios where well-typed processes leak significant amounts of memory. We address these problems basing the type system upon an original variant of session types.