Selected Papers of the 23rd International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages (COORDINATION 2021)

Editors: Ferruccio Damiani, Ornela Dardha


1. Relating Functional and Imperative Session Types

Hannes Saffrich ; Peter Thiemann.
Imperative session types provide an imperative interface to session-typed communication. In such an interface, channel references are first-class objects with operations that change the typestate of the channel. Compared to functional session type APIs, the program structure is simpler at the surface, but typestate is required to model the current state of communication throughout. Following an early work that explored the imperative approach, a significant body of work on session types has neglected the imperative approach and opts for a functional approach that uses linear types to manage channel references soundly. We demonstrate that the functional approach subsumes the early work on imperative session types by exhibiting a typing and semantics preserving translation into a system of linear functional session types. We further show that the untyped backwards translation from the functional to the imperative calculus is semantics preserving. We restrict the type system of the functional calculus such that the backwards translation becomes type preserving. Thus, we precisely capture the difference in expressiveness of the two calculi and conclude that the lack of expressiveness in the imperative calculus is largely due to restrictions imposed by its type system.

2. A theory of Automated Market Makers in DeFi

Massimo Bartoletti ; James Hsin-yu Chiang ; Alberto Lluch-Lafuente.
Automated market makers (AMMs) are one of the most prominent decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. AMMs allow users to trade different types of crypto-tokens, without the need to find a counter-party. There are several implementations and models for AMMs, featuring a variety of sophisticated economic mechanisms. We present a theory of AMMs. The core of our theory is an abstract operational model of the interactions between users and AMMs, which can be concretised by instantiating the economic mechanisms. We exploit our theory to formally prove a set of fundamental properties of AMMs, characterizing both structural and economic aspects. We do this by abstracting from the actual economic mechanisms used in implementations, and identifying sufficient conditions which ensure the relevant properties. Notably, we devise a general solution to the arbitrage problem, the main game-theoretic foundation behind the economic mechanisms of AMMs.

3. Deconfined Global Types for Asynchronous Sessions

Francesco Dagnino ; Paola Giannini ; Mariangiola Dezani-Ciancaglini.
Multiparty sessions with asynchronous communications and global types play an important role for the modelling of interaction protocols in distributed systems. In designing such calculi the aim is to enforce, by typing, good properties for all participants, maximising, at the same time, the accepted behaviours. Our type system improves the state-of-the-art by typing all asynchronous sessions and preserving the key properties of Subject Reduction, Session Fidelity and Progress when some well-formedness conditions are satisfied. The type system comes together with a sound and complete type inference algorithm. The well-formedness conditions are undecidable, but an algorithm checking an expressive restriction of them recovers the effectiveness of typing.

4. Concurrent Process Histories and Resource Transducers

Chad Nester.
We identify the algebraic structure of the material histories generated by concurrent processes. Specifically, we extend existing categorical theories of resource convertibility to capture concurrent interaction. Our formalism admits an intuitive graphical presentation via string diagrams for proarrow equipments. We also consider certain induced categories of resource transducers, which are of independent interest due to their unusual structure.