Session Coalgebras: A Coalgebraic View on Regular and Context-free Session Types

Compositional methods are central to the verification of software systems. For concurrent and communicating systems, compositional techniques based on behavioural type systems have received much attention. By abstracting communication protocols as types, these type systems can statically check that channels in a program interact following a certain protocol—whether messages are exchanged in the intended order.

In this article, we put on our coalgebraic spectacles to investigate session types, a widely studied class of behavioural type systems. We provide a syntax-free description of session-based concurrency as states of coalgebras. As a result, we rediscover type equivalence, duality, and subtyping relations in terms of canonical coinductive presentations. In turn, this coinductive presentation enables us to derive a decidable type system with subtyping for the π-calculus, in which the states of a coalgebra will serve as channel protocols. Going full circle, we exhibit a coalgebra structure on an existing session type system, and show that the relations and type system resulting from our coalgebraic perspective coincide with existing ones. We further apply to session coalgebras the coalgebraic approach to regular languages via the so-called rational fixed point, inspired by the trinity of automata, regular languages, and regular expressions with session coalgebras, rational fixed point, and session types, respectively. We establish a suitable restriction on session coalgebras that determines a similar trinity, and reveals the mismatch between usual session types and our syntax-free coalgebraic approach. Furthermore, we extend our coalgebraic approach to account for context-free session types, by equipping session coalgebras with a stack.