Bringing Fearless Concurrency to the Masses

More details can be found in the PLDI paper.

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Mae Milano
PhD, Programming Languages and Systems

Publications

This paper proposes a new type system for concurrent programs, allowing threads to exchange complex object graphs without risking destructive data races. While this goal is shared by a rich history of past work, existing solutions either rely on strictly enforced heap invariants that prohibit natural programming patterns or demand pervasive annotations even for simple programming tasks. As a result, past systems cannot express intuitively simple code without unnatural rewrites or substantial annotation burdens. Our work avoids these pitfalls through a novel type system that provides sound reasoning about separation in the heap while remaining flexible enough to support a wide range of desirable heap manipulations. This new sweet spot is attained by enforcing a heap domination invariant similarly to prior work, but tempering it by allowing complex exceptions that add little annotation burden. Our results include: (1) code examples showing that common data structure manipulations which are difficult or impossible to express in prior work are natural and direct in our system, (2) a formal proof of correctness demonstrating that well-typed programs cannot encounter destructive data races at run time, and (3) an efficient type checker implemented in Gallina and OCaml.
PLDI 2022: Proceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, 2022

Talks

Careful Language Design builds Better Systems

Presenting a new type system for Fearless Concurrency

Presenting a new type system for Fearless Concurrency

Presenting a new type system for Fearless Concurrency
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