A Session Subtyping Tool (Extended Version)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a tool designed to make the complex theory of asynchronous session subtyping more accessible, facilitating its integration into practical programming applications involving session types.

Contribution

The paper presents a new tool that simplifies understanding and applying asynchronous session subtyping, bridging the gap between theory and practical implementation.

Findings

The tool effectively visualizes asynchronous session subtyping concepts.

It enables users to experiment with subtyping relations.

The tool promotes wider adoption of asynchronous session subtyping in programming languages.

Abstract

Session types are becoming popular and have been integrated in several mainstream programming languages. Nevertheless, while many programming languages consider asynchronous fifo channel communication, the notion of subtyping used in session type implementations is the one defined by Gay and Hole for synchronous communication. This might be because there are several notions of asynchronous session subtyping, these notions are usually undecidable, and only recently sound (but not complete) algorithmic characterizations for these subtypings have been proposed. But the fact that the definition of asynchronous session subtyping and the theory behind related algorithms are not easily accessible to non-experts may also prevent further integration. The aim of this paper, and of the tool presented therein, is to make the growing body of knowledge about asynchronous session subtyping more accessible, thus promoting its integration in practical applications of session types.