Checking type safety of foreign function calls

13 years 10 months ago

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We present a multi-lingual type inference system for checking type safety across a foreign function interface. The goal of our system is to prevent foreign function calls from introducing type and memory safety violations into an otherwise safe language. Our system targets OCaml’s FFI to C, which is relatively lightweight and illustrates some interesting challenges in multi-lingual type inference. The type language in our system embeds OCaml types in C types and vice-versa, which allows us to track type information accurately even through the foreign language, where the original types are lost. Our system uses representational types that can model multiple OCaml types, because C programs can observe that many OCaml types have the same physical representation. Furthermore, because C has a low-level view of OCaml data, our inference system includes a dataﬂow analysis to track memory offsets and tag information. Finally, our type system includes garbage collection information to ensu...

Michael Furr, Jeffrey S. Foster

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