SHF:Small:Collaborative Research: Languages and Tools for Multilingual Systems

软件开发人员越来越多地使用多种语言构建应用程序，以便重用现有的软件库，并利用最适合其问题的语言。事实上，多语言程序已经很流行了，因为基本上所有用Java编写的程序都使用用C编写的代码。但是开发多语言程序比开发单语言程序面临更多的挑战和困难。当前多语言之间的编程接口往往是乏味和不安全的；而且大多数编程工具只支持一种语言。因此，现实世界中的多语言程序充满了跨语言的bug。本研究旨在大幅改善多语言程式的正确性和发展。研究人员基于他们先前的多语言设计（Jeannie Java/C语言）、编译器（xtc Jeannie编译器）和调试器（Blink Java/C调试器）进行构建。在这里，研究人员正在设计和实施新的方法来验证现有多语言接口的安全性，并创建安全的多语言程序。(1)研究人员正在开发一个框架，用于简洁地捕获多语言界面的安全规则，然后自动合成相应的动态检查器。(2)研究人员正在探索新的程序分析，以自动将使用不安全多语言接口的程序重构为使用安全多语言接口的程序。如果成功，研究的影响将是提高多语言程序的正确性、效率和可靠性。

Software developers are increasingly building applications in multiple languages both to reuse existing software libraries and to leverage the languages best suited to their problems. In fact, multilingual programs are already prevalent, as essentially all programs written in Java use code written in C as well. But developing multilingual programs poses more challenges and difficulties than developing single language programs. Current programming interfaces between multiple languages tend to be tedious and unsafe; and most programming tools only support a single language. As a consequence, real-world multilingual programs are full of cross-language bugs.This research seeks to substantially improve the correctness and development of multilingual programs. The investigators build on their prior multilingual language design (the Jeannie Java/C language), compilers (the xtc Jeannie compiler), and debuggers (the Blink Java/C debugger). Here, the investigators are designing and implementing novel approaches for validating the safety of existing multilingual interfaces and for creating safe multilingual programs. (1) The investigators are developing a framework for concisely capturing safety rules for multilingual interfaces and then automatically synthesizing the corresponding dynamic checker. (2) The investigators are exploring novel program analysis to refactor programs automatically that use unsafe multilingual interfaces into programs that use safe multilingual interfaces. If successful, the research impact will be improved correctness, efficiency, and reliability of multilingual programs.