Practical Refinement Session Type Inference (Extended Version)

Session types express and enforce safe communication in concurrent message-passing systems by statically capturing the interaction protocols between processes in the type. Recent works extend session types with arithmetic refinements, which enable additional fine-grained description of communication, but impose additional annotation burden on the programmer. To alleviate this burden, we propose a type inference algorithm for a session type system with arithmetic refinements. We develop a theory of subtyping for session types, including an algorithm which we prove sound with respect to a semantic definition based on type simulation. We also provide a formal inference algorithm that generates type and arithmetic constraints, which are then solved using the Z3 SMT solver. The algorithm has been implemented on top of the Rast language, and includes 3 key optimizations that make inference feasible and practical. We evaluate the efficacy of our inference engine by evaluating it on 6 challenging benchmarks, ranging from unary and binary natural numbers to linear $λ$-calculus. We show the performance benefits provided by our optimizations in coercing Z3 into solving the arithmetic constraints in reasonable time.

💡 Research Summary

This paper presents a novel type inference algorithm for session types extended with arithmetic refinements, aiming to reduce the annotation burden on programmers while maintaining the expressive power to specify detailed communication protocols. Session types statically enforce safe communication patterns in concurrent message-passing programs, and refinements allow indexing types with arithmetic constraints (e.g., `nat