Environment classifiers were proposed as a new approach to typing multi-stage languages. Safety was established in the simply-typed and let-polymorphic settings. While the motivation for classifiers was the feasibility of inference, this was in fact not established. This paper starts with the observation that inference for the full classifier-based system fails. We then identify a subset of the original system for which inference is possible. This subset, which uses implicit classifiers, retains significant expressivity (e.g. it can embed the calculi of Davies and Pfenning) and eliminates the need for classifier names in terms. Implicit classifiers were implemented in MetaOCaml, and no changes were needed to make an existing test suite acceptable by the new type checker.

Self-modifying code (SMC), in this paper, broadly refers to any program that loads, generates, or mutates code at runtime. It is widely used in many of the world’s critical software systems to support runtime code generation and optimization, dynamic loading and linking, OS boot loader, just-in-time compilation, binary translation, or dynamic code encryption and obfuscation. Unfortunately, SMC is also extremely di   cult to reason about: existing formal verification techniques—including Hoare logic and type system— consistently assume that program code stored in memory is fixed and immutable; this severely limits their applicability and power. This paper presents a simple but novel Hoare-logic-like framework that supports modular verification of general von-Neumann machine code with runtime code manipulation. By dropping the assumption that code memory is fixed and immutable, we are forced to apply local reasoning and separation logic at the very beginning, and treat program code uniformly as regular data structure. We address the interaction between separation and code memory and show how to establish the frame rules for local reasoning even in the presence of SMC. Our framework is realistic, but designed to be highly generic, so that it can support assembly code under all modern CPUs (including both x86 and MIPS). Our system is expressive and fully mechanized. We prove its soundness in the Coq proof assistant and demonstrate its power by certifying a series of realistic examples and applications—all of which can directly run on the SPIM simulator or any stock x86 hardware.

Cyclone is a type-safe programming language that provides explicit run-time code generation. The Cyclone compiler uses a template-based strategy for run-time code generation in which pre-compiled code fragments are stitched together at run time. This strategy keeps the cost of code generation low, but it requires that optimizations, such as register allocation and code motion, are applied to templates at compile time. This paper describes a principled approach to implementing such optimizations. In particular, we generalize standard ow-graph intermediate representations to support templates, de ne a mapping from (a subset of) Cyclone to this representation, and describe a dataow-analysis framework that supports standard optimizations across template boundaries.

Program generators are most naturally specified using a quote/antiquote facility; the programmer writes programs with holes which are filled in, at program generation time, by other program fragments. If the programs are generated at compile-time, analysis and compilation follow generation, and no changes in the compiler are needed. However, if program generation is done at run time, compilation and analysis need to be optimized so that they will not overwhelm overall execution time. In this paper, we give a compositional framework for defining program analyses which leads directly to a method of staging these analyses. The staging allows the analysis of incomplete programs to be started at compile time; the residual work to be done at run time may be much less costly than the full analysis. We give frameworks for forward and backward analyses, present several examples of specific analyses, and give timing results showing significant speed-ups for the run-time portion of the analysis relative to the full analysis.

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Program generators are most naturally specified using a quote/antiquote facility; the programmer writes programs with holes which are filled in, at program generation time, by other program fragments. If the programs are generated at compile-time, analysis and compilation follow generation, and no changes in the compiler are needed. However, if program generation is done at run time, compilation and analysis need to be optimized so that they will not overwhelm overall execution time. In this paper, we give a compositional framework for defining program analyses which leads directly to a method of staging these analyses. The staging allows the analysis of incomplete programs to be started at compile time; the residual work to be done at run time may be much less costly than the full analysis. We give frameworks for forward and backward analyses, present several examples of specific analyses, and give timing results showing significant speed-ups for the run-time portion of the analysis relative to the full analysis. Our framework is defined on abstract syntax trees (AST), because program fragments appear as AST’s. We give a translation from source-level code to an intermediate representation (IR) and show that our staging methodology is applicable at the IR-level, too.