Described are embodiments for developing a message-passing application program. The program is constructed using stages having a plurality of asynchronous functions, or operations. The operations communicate with other operations of other message-passing programs in a distributed computing environment. The operations also communicate with other operations on other stages of the message-passing application. In order to reduce deadlock errors, a behavioral type signature is appended to the declaration of each operation of the message-passing application program. The behavioral type signature specifies behavioral properties for each operation, such as when an operation should send a message to another operation. A type checker utilizes typing rules and the behavioral type signature to extract an implementation model of each function. The type checker then compares the implementation model to the behavioral type signature to determine whether the asynchronous function conforms to the behavioral type signature.