research-article

Inferable object-oriented typed assembly language

Authors:

Chris HawblitzelAuthors Info & Claims

PLDI '10: Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

Pages 424 - 435

https://doi.org/10.1145/1806596.1806644

Published: 05 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

A certifying compiler preserves type information through compilation to assembly language programs, producing typed assembly language (TAL) programs that can be verified for safety independently so that the compiler does not need to be trusted. There are two challenges for adopting certifying compilation in practice. First, requiring every compiler transformation and optimization to preserve types is a large burden on compilers, especially when adopting certifying compilation into existing optimizing non-certifying compilers. Second, type annotations significantly increase the size of assembly language programs.

This paper proposes an alternative to traditional certifying compilers. It presents iTalX, the first inferable TAL type system that supports existential types, arrays, interfaces, and stacks. We have proved our inference algorithm is complete, meaning if an assembly language program is typeable with iTalX then our algorithm will infer an iTalX typing for that program. Furthermore, our algorithm is guaranteed to terminate even if the assembly language program is untypeable. We demonstrate that it is practical to infer such an expressive TAL by showing a prototype implementation of type inference for code compiled by Bartok, an optimizing C# compiler. Our prototype implementation infers complete type annotations for 98% of functions in a suite of realistic C# benchmarks. The type-inference time is about 8% of the compilation time. We needed to change only 2.5% of the compiler code, mostly adding new code for defining types and for writing types to object files. Most transformations are untouched. Type-annotation size is only 17% of the size of pure code and data, reducing type annotations in our previous certifying compiler [4] by 60%. The compiler needs to preserve only essential type information such as method signatures, object-layout information, and types for static data and external labels. Even non-certifying compilers have most of this information available.

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Cited By

Belyakova JChung BTate RVitek J(2024)Decidable Subtyping of Existential Types for JuliaProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36564218:PLDI(1091-1114)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656421
Bharadwaj VRao M(2016)Compiler optimization for superscalar and pipelined processors2016 IEEE Distributed Computing, VLSI, Electrical Circuits and Robotics (DISCOVER)10.1109/DISCOVER.2016.7806224(232-236)Online publication date: Aug-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/DISCOVER.2016.7806224
Tan JTay HGandhi RNarasimhan P(2015)AUSPICERevised Selected Papers of the 7th International Conference on Verified Software: Theories, Tools, and Experiments - Volume 959310.1007/978-3-319-29613-5_12(202-222)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-319-29613-5_12
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Index Terms

Inferable object-oriented typed assembly language
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
    2. Formal language definitions
2. Theory of computation
  1. Formal languages and automata theory

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cover image ACM Conferences

PLDI '10: Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 2010

514 pages

ISBN:9781450300193

DOI:10.1145/1806596

General Chair:
Ben Zorn
Microsoft Research
,
Program Chair:
Alex Aiken
Stanford University

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 45, Issue 6
PLDI '10
June 2010
496 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1809028
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2010 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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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 05 June 2010

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PLDI '10: ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

June 5 - 10, 2010

Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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Cited By

Belyakova JChung BTate RVitek J(2024)Decidable Subtyping of Existential Types for JuliaProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36564218:PLDI(1091-1114)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656421
Bharadwaj VRao M(2016)Compiler optimization for superscalar and pipelined processors2016 IEEE Distributed Computing, VLSI, Electrical Circuits and Robotics (DISCOVER)10.1109/DISCOVER.2016.7806224(232-236)Online publication date: Aug-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/DISCOVER.2016.7806224
Tan JTay HGandhi RNarasimhan P(2015)AUSPICERevised Selected Papers of the 7th International Conference on Verified Software: Theories, Tools, and Experiments - Volume 959310.1007/978-3-319-29613-5_12(202-222)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-319-29613-5_12
Nia MAtani RRuiz-Martínez A(2015)Privacy enhancement in anonymous network channels using multimodality injectionSecurity and Communication Networks10.1002/sec.12198:16(2917-2932)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/sec.1219
Coughlin DChang B(2014)Fissile type analysisACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2578855.253585549:1(73-85)Online publication date: 8-Jan-2014
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Coughlin DChang BJagannathan SSewell P(2014)Fissile type analysisProceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages10.1145/2535838.2535855(73-85)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2535838.2535855
Nia MAtani RHaghi A(2014)Ubiquitous IoT structure via homogeneous data type modelling7'th International Symposium on Telecommunications (IST'2014)10.1109/ISTEL.2014.7000715(283-288)Online publication date: Sep-2014
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Nia MKarbasi AAtani R(2014)Stop tracking me: An anti-detection type solution for anonymous data2014 4th International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering (ICCKE)10.1109/ICCKE.2014.6993463(685-690)Online publication date: Oct-2014
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCKE.2014.6993463
Nia MAtani RRuiz-Martínez A(2015)Privacy enhancement in anonymous network channels using multimodality injectionSecurity and Communication Networks10.1002/sec.12198:16(2917-2932)Online publication date: 9-Feb-2015
https://doi.org/10.1002/sec.1219

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