A Flexible Type System for Fearless Concurrency
published on 2023/05/14
This paper proposes a new type system for concurrent pro- grams, allowing threads to exchange complex object graphs without risking destructive data races. While this goal is shared by a rich history of past work, existing solutions ei- ther rely on strictly enforced heap invariants that prohibit natural programming patterns or demand pervasive annota- tions even for simple programming tasks. As a result, past systems cannot express intuitively simple code without un- natural rewrites or substantial annotation burdens. Our work avoids these pitfalls through a novel type system that pro- vides sound reasoning about separation in the heap while remaining flexible enough to support a wide range of desir- able heap manipulations. This new sweet spot is attained by enforcing a heap domination invariant similarly to prior work, but tempering it by allowing complex exceptions that add little annotation burden. Our results include: (1) code examples showing that common data structure manipula- tions which are difficult or impossible to express in prior work are natural and direct in our system, (2) a formal proof of correctness demonstrating that well-typed programs can- not encounter destructive data races at run time, and (3) an efficient type checker implemented in Gallina and OCaml.
Concurrency is hard. It's good to see more exploration on how to solve it via type system.