Efficient, Portable, Census-Polymorphic Choreographic Programming
Abstract
Choreographic programming (CP) is a paradigm for implementing distributed systems that uses a single global program to define the actions and interactions of all participants. Library-level CP implementations, like HasChor, integrate well with mainstream programming languages but have several limitations: Their conditionals require extra communication; they require specific host-language features (e.g., monads); and they lack support for programming patterns that are essential for implementing realistic distributed applications. We make three contributions to library-level CP to specifically address these challenges. First, we propose and formalize conclaves and multiply-located values, which enable efficient conditionals in library-level CP without redundant communication. Second, we propose end-point projection as dependency injection, a design pattern that enables library-level CP in host languages without support for monads. Third, we propose census polymorphism, a technique for abstracting over the number of participants in a choreography. We demonstrate these contributions via implementations in Haskell, Rust, and TypeScript.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2412.02107,
title = {Efficient, Portable, Census-Polymorphic Choreographic Programming},
author = {Mako Bates and Shun Kashiwa and Syed Jafri and Gan Shen and Lindsey Kuper and Joseph P. Near},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.02107},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Presenting at PLDI25