Static checking of interprocess communication in ECSP

Abstract

The structure of a compiler for the ECSP language is described. ECSP is a concurrent language extending Hoare's CSP: it supports dynamic communication channels and nested processes. The compilation of ECPS programs is obtained by the composition of several tools of minimal functionalities.A set of static checks on interactions between concurrent processes is described. The checks verify the mutual consistency of the interfaces of processes: an interface is given by a set of input/output channels connecting a process to its partners. It is shown that the amount and the coverage of checks depend on the entities referred to in interprocess communication constructs and that both increase with the adoption of explicit naming.The checks on process interfaces are carried on in several tool of the compiler front-end to achieve machine independence. To support separate compilation, each tool can be applied to a subset of the processes of a program.