Abstract
Through foreign function interfaces (FFIs), software components in different programming languages interact with each other in the same address space. Recent years have witnessed a number of systems that analyze FFIs for safety and reliability. However, lack of formal specifications of FFIs hampers progress in this endeavor. We present a formal operational model, JNI Light (JNIL), for a subset of a widely used FFI—the Java Native Interface (JNI). JNIL focuses on the core issues when a high-level garbage-collected language interacts with a low-level language. It proposes abstractions for handling a shared heap, crosslanguage method calls, cross-language exception handling, and garbage collection. JNIL can directly serve as a formal basis for JNI tools and systems. The abstractions in JNIL are also useful when modeling other FFIs, such as the Python/C interface and the OCaml/C interface.
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Tan, G. (2010). JNI Light: An Operational Model for the Core JNI. In: Ueda, K. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6461. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17164-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17164-2_9
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