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.