Dialectic

dialectic (noun): The process of arriving at the truth by stating a thesis, developing a contradictory antithesis, and combining them into a coherent synthesis.

dialectic (crate): Transport-polymorphic session types for asynchronous Rust.

When two concurrent processes communicate, it's good to give their messages types, which ensure every message is of an expected form.

• Conventional types merely describe what is valid to communicate.
• Session types describe when it is valid to communicate, and in what manner.

This crate provides a generic wrapper around almost any type of asynchronous channel that adds compile-time guarantees that a specified session protocol will not be violated by any code using the channel. Such a wrapped channel:

• has almost no runtime cost in time or memory;
• is built on async/.await to allow integration with Rust's powerful async ecosystem;
• gracefully handles runtime protocol violations, introducing no panics;
• allows for full duplex concurrent communication, if specified in its type, while preserving all the same session-type safety guarantees; and
• can even implement context free sessions, a more general form of session type than supported by most other session typing libraries.

Together, these make Dialectic ideal for writing networked services that need to ensure high levels of availability and complex protocol correctness properties in the real world, where protocols might be violated and connections might be dropped.

Dialectic supports a number of async runtimes and backends out-of-the-box, if you don't want to or don't need to write your own:

• The dialectic-tokio-mpsc crate supports using Dialectic to communicate between tasks using Tokio's mpsc queues.
• The dialectic-tokio-serde crate supports using Dialectic to communicate over any AsyncRead/AsyncWrite transport layer encoded using any Tokio codec. A couple of Serde formats are already implemented, but it is easy to implement your own:
  • dialectic-tokio-serde-bincode backend using bincode for serialization
  • dialectic-tokio-serde-json backend using serde_json for serialization

These crates also serve as good references for writing your own backends.

What now?

• If you are new to session types you might consider starting with the tutorial-style tour of the crate.
• If you're familiar with session types, you might jump to the quick reference, then read more about the Session! macro for specifying session types, and continue on to look at the types module and the documentation for Chan.
• You may also find helpful the full self-contained examples, which show how all the features of the crate come together to build session-typed network programs.
• If you want to integrate your own channel type with Dialectic, you need to implement the Transmit and Receive traits from the backend module.
• Or, you can dive into the reference documentation...