Towards Mailbox Typing for Erlang - Lightning Talk

Explore a lightning talk from Erlang'23 that delves into the concept of mailbox typing for Erlang. Learn about this innovative technique aimed at detecting concurrency errors in actor-based languages like Erlang and Elixir. Discover how mailbox types characterize the state of a process's mailbox using commutative regular expressions, helping to identify protocol violations, payload mismatches, and self-deadlocks. Gain insights into ongoing research developing a mailbox typing tool for Erlang codebases, complementing existing tools like the Concuerror model checker. Follow the presentation as it covers introduction, examples, troubleshooting, tools, mailbox types, mailbox life cycle, mailbox typing for Erlang, and annotations. Presented by Simon Fowler as part of the STARDUST project, this 14-minute talk offers a concise yet informative look at an emerging approach to enhancing concurrency safety in Erlang programming.