A Message-Passing Interpretation of Adjoint Logic

Abstract

We present a system of session types based on adjoint logic which generalize standard binary session types. Our system allows us to uniformly capture several new behaviors in the space of asynchronous message-passing communication, including multicast, where a process sends a single message to multiple clients, replicable services, which have multiple clients and replicate themselves on-demand to handle requests from those clients, and cancellation, where a process discards a channel without communicating along it. We provide session fidelity and deadlock-freedom results for this system, from which we then derive a logically justified form of garbage collection.