Article

Operational semantics for multi-language programs

Authors:

Jacob Matthews,

Robert Bruce FindlerAuthors Info & Claims

POPL '07: Proceedings of the 34th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

Pages 3 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/1190216.1190220

Published: 17 January 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Inter-language interoperability is big business, as the success of Microsoft's .NET and COM and Sun's JVM show. Programming language designers are designing programming languages that reflect that fact --- SML#, Mondrian, and Scala, to name just a few examples, all treat interoperability with other languages as a central design feature. Still, current multi-language research tends not to focus on the semantics of interoperation features, but only on how to implement them efficiently. In this paper, we take first steps toward higher-level models of interoperating systems. Our technique abstracts away the low-level details of interoperability like garbage collection and representation coherence, and lets us focus on semantic properties like type-safety and observable equivalence.Beyond giving simple expressive models that are natural compositions of single-language models, our studies have uncovered several interesting facts about interoperability. For example, higher-order contracts naturally emerge as the glue to ensure that interoperating languages respect each other's type systems. While we present our results in an abstract setting, they shed light on real multi-language systems and tools such as the JNI, SWIG, and Haskell's stable pointers.

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Index Terms

Operational semantics for multi-language programs
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Formal language definitions
      1. Semantics
2. Theory of computation
  1. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program semantics

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

POPL '07: Proceedings of the 34th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

January 2007

400 pages

ISBN:1595935754

DOI:10.1145/1190216

General Chair:
Martin Hofmann
Ludwig-Maximilians U, Munich, Germany
,
Program Chair:
Matthias Felleisen
Northeastern University, Boston MA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 42, Issue 1
Proceedings of the 2007 POPL Conference
January 2007
379 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1190215
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 17 January 2007

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POPL07: The 34th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

January 17 - 19, 2007

Nice, France

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POPL '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 198 submissions, 18%;

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Ballantyne MGamburg MHemann J(2024)Compiled, Extensible, Multi-language DSLs (Functional Pearl)Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36746278:ICFP(64-87)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3674627
LHOTÁK OWADLER P(2024)A simple blame calculus for explicit nullsJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682400012134Online publication date: 27-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796824000121
SU CCHEN LYANHUI LZHOU Y(2024)Static Blame for gradual typingJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682400002934Online publication date: 25-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796824000029
Guéneau AHostert JSpies SSammler MBirkedal LDreyer D(2023)Melocoton: A Program Logic for Verified Interoperability Between OCaml and CProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228237:OOPSLA2(716-744)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
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Sammler MSpies SSong YD'Osualdo EKrebbers RGarg DDreyer D(2023)DimSum: A Decentralized Approach to Multi-language Semantics and VerificationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35712207:POPL(775-805)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2023
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Cimini M(2022)Lang-n-Send: Processes That Send LanguagesElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.356.5356(46-56)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2022
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