Practical implementations of high-level languages must provide access to libraries and system services that have APIs specified in a low-level language (usually C). An important characteristic of such mechanisms is the foreign-interface policy that defines how to bridge the semantic gap between the high-level language and C. For example, IDL-based tools generate code to marshal data into and out of the high-level representation according to user annotations. The design space of foreign-interface policies is large and there are pros and cons to each approach. Rather than commit to a particular policy, we choose to focus on the problem of supporting a gamut of interoperability policies. In this paper, we describe a framework for language interoperability that is expressive enough to support very efficient implementations of a wide range of different foreign-interface policies. We describe two tools that implement substantially different policies on top of our framework and present benchmarks that demonstrate their efficiency. 1 Email: kfisher@research.att.com 2 Email: riccardo@cs.cornell.edu 3 Email: jhr@research.bell-labs.com This is a preliminary version. The nal version will be published in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science URL: www.elsevier.nl/locate/entcs Fisher, Pucella, and Reppy 1

Practical implementations of high-level languages must provide access to libraries and system services that have APIs specified in a low-level language (usually C). Our approach to supporting foreign interfaces in the MOBY compiler is based on a mechanism for data-level interoperability, which allows MOBY code to manipulate C data representations directly. Datalevel interoperability is important when dealing with large external data sets or data that is in a fixed format. It also serves as the foundation for a wide range of different foreign-interface policies. We describe tools that implement three such policies: Charon, which embeds C types directly into MOBY, moby-idl, which provides an IDL-based embedding, and an API miner, which enables application-specific embeddings. The benefits of our approach stem from the design of our compiler and do not rely on properties of the MOBY language. 1 Introduction High-level languages, such as most functional and object-oriented langu...

Abstract: Abstract State Machines (ASMs) have been widely used to specify software and hardware systems. Only a few of these specifications are executable, although there are several interpreters and some compilers. This paper introduces a compilation scheme to transform an ASM specification in the syntax of the ASM-Workbench into C++. In particular, we transform algebraic types, pattern matching, functional expressions, dynamic functions, and simultaneous updates to C++ code. The main aim of this compilation scheme is to preserve the specification structure in the generated code

Practical implementations of high-level languages must provide access to libraries and system services that have APIs specified in a low-level language (usually C). Our approach to supporting foreign interfaces in the MOBY compiler is based on a mechanism for data-level interoperability, which allows MOBY code to manipulate C data representations directly. Datalevel interoperability is important when dealing with large external data sets or data that is in a fixed format. It also serves as the foundation for a wide range of different foreign-interface policies. We describe tools that implement three such policies: Charon, which embeds C types directly into MOBY, moby-idl, which provides an IDL-based embedding, and an API miner, which enables application-specific embeddings. The benefits of our approach stem from the design of our compiler and do not rely on properties of the MOBY language. 1 Introduction High-level languages, such as most functional and object-oriented langu...