On duality relations for session types

Abstract. Session types are a type formalism used to describe communication protocols over private session channels. Each participant in a binary session owns one endpoint of a session channel. A key notion is that of duality: the endpoints of a session channel should have dual session types in order to guarantee communi-cation safety. Duality relations have been independently defined in different ways and different works, without considering their effect on the type system. In this paper we systematically study the existing duality relations and some new ones, and compare them in order to understand their expressiveness. The outcome is that those relations are split into two groups, one related to the naı̈ve inductive duality, and the other related to a notion of mutual compliance, which we borrow from the literature on contracts for web-services.