Choreographies meet Communication Failures (1712.05465v2)

Abstract: Choreographies are global descriptions of communication structures, inspired by the "Alice and Bob" notation of security protocols. They have been successfully employed in the design and implementation of distributed systems. However, there is still limited evidence of the applicability of choreographies in the real-world setting of distributed programming, where communication actions may fail. In this work, we propose the first choreography model that allows for communication failures and the programming of user-defined code to deal with such failures. We validate our model by implementing common strategies for handling communication failures in a robust way, which in turn can be used as a library by choreographies that assume reliable communication. We equip our model with a typing discipline that can statically verify reliability properties, in particular at-most-once and exactly-once delivery. We demonstrate the applicability of our model by defining a semantics-preserving compilation procedure towards a process calculus equipped with unreliable I/O actions.