Concurrent All the Way Down: Functional Concurrency with Libretto by Tomas Mikula | Lambda Days 2023

"In this talk, I will present Libretto, a Scala DSL that is concurrent by default, with no notion of a thread. The goal is for causal dependence to be the only form of sequencing. Everything else is automatically concurrent—no need to manage concurrency manually. Session types facilitate safe interaction between parts of the program, while linear types ensure resource safety.

We will see that concurrent programming can be made as seamless as sequential programming is today"

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[BenHutchison]

My main difficulty with this talk is that it introduces a graphical notation, perhaps to appeal to our intuition, without really defining what it means in terms of Scala (the substrate for Libretto), then heavily leans on this notation through many slides, and then finally makes some bold but rather unclear claims like "effects are not necessary to do concurrency", and ends without every showing a working code snippet that I can run, or parse, or ponder. The claim may or may not be true, but at the end of the talk, I feel unable to evaluate for myself, since the presented semantics are so sketchy.