Demystifying magic: high-level low-level programming

r of high-level languages lies in their abstraction over hardware and software complexity, leading to greater security, better reliability, and lower development costs. However, opaque abstractions are often show-stoppers for systems programmers, forcto either break the abstraction, or more often, simply give up and use a different language. This paper addresses the challenge of opening up a high-level language to allow practical low-level programming without forsaking integrity or performance. The contribution of this paper is three-fold: 1) we draw together common threads in a diverse literature, 2) we identify a framework for extending high-level languages for low-level programming, and 3) we show the power of this approach through concrete case studies. Our framework leverages just three core ideas: extending semantics via intrinsic methods, extending types via unboxing and architectural-width primitives, and controlling semantics via scoped semantic regimes. We develop these idea...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: VEE
• Authors: Daniel Frampton, Stephen M. Blackburn, Perry Cheng, Robin Garner, David Grove, J. Eliot B. Moss, Sergey I. Salishev
• Keywords: Low-level Programming, Lower Development Costs, Practical Low-level Programming, VEE 2009, Virtualization