[pl-seminar] Tristan's practice talk

[Steve Jackson <sjackso@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The PL seminar is meeting again this week for another PLDI practice  
talk.  Come to give feedback, and to hear Tristan complain about the C  
type system!  :-)

Title: Automatic Generation of Library Bindings Using Static Analysis
Thursday, May 21, 4:00 pm, Room 3310 CS

Abstract:
High-level languages are growing in popularity. However, decades of C
software development have produced large libraries of fast, time-
tested, meritorious code that are impractical to recreate from
scratch.  Cross-language bindings can expose low-level C code to
high-level languages. Unfortunately, writing bindings by hand is
tedious and error-prone, while mainstream binding generators require
extensive manual annotation or fail to offer the language features
that users of modern languages have come to expect.

We present an improved binding-generation strategy based on static
analysis of unannotated library source code. We characterize three
high-level idioms that are not uniquely expressible in C’s low-level
type system: array parameters, resource managers, and multiple return
values. We describe a suite of interprocedural analyses that recover
this high-level information, and we show how the results can be used
in a binding generator for the Python programming language. In
experiments with four large C libraries, we find that our approach
avoids the mistakes characteristic of hand-written bindings while
offering a level of Python integration unmatched by prior automated
approaches. Among the thousands of functions in the public interfaces
of these libraries, roughly 40% exhibit the behaviors detected by our
static analyses.

Joint work with Steve Jackson, Eric Aderhold, and Ben Liblit.