Programmers compose programs in multiple languages to combine the
advantages of innovations in new high-level programming languages with
decades of engineering effort in legacy libraries and systems. For
language inter-operation, language designers provide two classes of
multilingual programming interfaces: (1) foreign function interfaces
and (2) code generation interfaces. These interfaces embody the
semantic mismatch for developers and multilingual systems
builders. Their programming rules are difficult or impossible to
verify. As a direct consequence, multilingual programs are full of
bugs at interface boundaries, and debuggers cannot assist developers
across these lines.
This dissertation shows how to use composition of single language
systems and interposition to improve the safety of multilingual
programs. Our compositional approach is scalable by construction
because it does not require any changes to single-language systems,
and it leverages their engineering efforts. We show it is effective by
composing a variety of multilingual tools that help programmers
eliminate bugs. We present the first concise taxonomy and formal
description of multilingual programming interfaces and their
programming rules. We next compose three classes of multilingual
tools: (1) Dynamic bug checkers for foreign function interfaces. We
demonstrate a new approach for automatically generating a dynamic bug
checker by interposing on foreign function interfaces, and we show
that it finds bugs in real-world applications including Eclipse,
Subversion, and Java Gnome. (2) Multilingual debuggers for foreign
function interfaces. We introduce an intermediate agent that wraps all
the methods and functions at language boundaries. This intermediate
agent is sufficient to build all the essential debugging features used
in single-language debuggers. (3) Safe macros for code generation
interfaces. We design a safe macro language, called Marco, that
generates programs in any language and demonstrate it by implementing
checkers for SQL and C++ generators. To check the correctness of the
generated programs, Marco queries single-language compilers and
interpreters through code generation interfaces. Using their error
messages, Marco points out the errors in program generators.
In summary, this dissertation presents the first concise taxonomy and
formal specification of multilingual interfaces and, based on this
taxonomy, shows how to compose multilingual tools to improve safety
in multilingual programs. Our results show that our compositional
approach is scalable and effective for improving safety in real-world
multilingual programs. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/ETD-UT-2011-08-4084 |
| Date | 12 October 2011 |
| Creators | Lee, Byeongcheol |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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