Copyedited by: ES MANUSCRIPT CATEGORY: Original Article Journal of Logic and Computation Advance Access published June 6, 2012 Uniqueness typing for resource management in message-passing concurrency EDSKO DEVRIES, Computer Science, Department of Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin 2 Ireland. E-mail:
[email protected] Downloaded from ADRIAN FRANCALANZA, Information and Communication Technology, University of Malta, MSD 2080, Malta. E-mail:
[email protected] MATTHEW HENNESSY, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College http://logcom.oxfordjournals.org/ Dublin, College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland. E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract We view channels as the main form of resources in a message-passing programming paradigm. These channels need to be carefully managed in settings where resources are scarce. To study this problem, we extend the pi-calculus with primitives for channel allocation and deallocation and allow channels to be reused to communicate values of different types. Inevitably, the at Trinity College Dublin on January 23, 2013 added expressiveness increases the possibilities for runtime errors. We define a substructural type system, which combines uniqueness typing and affine typing to reject these ill-behaved programs. Keywords: Message-passing concurrency, type systems, resource management 1 Introduction Message-passing concurrency is a programming paradigm whereby shared memory is prohibited and process interaction is limited to explicit message communication. This concurrency paradigm forms the basis for a number of process calculi such as the pi-calculus [22] and has been adopted by programming languages such as the actor-based language Erlang [3]. Message-passing concurrency often abstracts away from resource management and programs written at this abstraction level exhibit poor resource awareness.