The Buffered π-Calculus: A Model for Concurrent Languages

Message-passing based concurrent languages are widely used in developing large distributed and coordination systems. This paper presents the buffered π-calculus - a variant of the π-calculus where channel names are classified into buffered and unbuffered: communication along buffered channels is asynchronous, and remains synchronous along unbuffered channels. We show that the buffered π-calculus can be fully simulated in the polyadic π-calculus with respect to strong bisimulation. In contrast to the π-calculus which is hard to use in practice, the new language enables easy and clear modeling of practical concurrent languages. We encode two real-world concurrent languages in the buffered π-calculus: the (core) Go language and the Core Erlang. Both encodings are fully abstract with respect to weak bisimulations. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.