Assuming Just Enough Fairness to make Session Types Complete for Lock-freedom

Abstract

We investigate how different fairness assumptions affect results concerning lock-freedom, a typical liveness property targeted by session type systems. We fix a minimal session calculus and systematically take into account all known fairness assumptions, thereby identifying precisely three interesting and semantically distinct notions of lock-freedom, all of which having a sound session type system. We then show that, by using a general merge operator in an otherwise standard approach to global session types, we obtain a session type system complete for the strongest amongst those notions of lock-freedom, which assumes only justness of execution paths, a minimal fairness assumption for concurrent systems.