Termination in Concurrency, Revisited

08/02/2023

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by   Joseph W. N. Paulus, et al.

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Termination is a central property in sequential programming models: a term is terminating if all its reduction sequences are finite. Termination is also important in concurrency in general, and for message-passing programs in particular. A variety of type systems that enforce termination by typing have been developed. In this paper, we rigorously compare several type systems for π-calculus processes from the unifying perspective of termination. Adopting session types as reference framework, we consider two different type systems: one follows Deng and Sangiorgi's weight-based approach; the other is Caires and Pfenning's Curry-Howard correspondence between linear logic and session types. Our technical results precisely connect these very different type systems, and shed light on the classes of client/server interactions they admit as correct.