Automatic generation of library bindings using static analysis

High-level languages are growing in popularity. However, decades of C software development have produced large libraries of fast, timetested, meritorious code that are impractical to recreate from scratch. Cross-language bindings can expose low-level C code to high-level languages. Unfortunately, writing bindings by hand is tedious and error-prone, while mainstream binding generators require extensive manual annotation or fail to offer the language features that users of modern languages have come to expect. We present an improved binding-generation strategy based on static analysis of unannotated library source code. We characterize three high-level idioms that are not uniquely expressible in C's lowlevel type system: array parameters, resource managers, and multiple return values. We describe a suite of interprocedural analyses that recover this high-level information, and we show how the results can be used in a binding generator for the Python programming language. In experim...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Tristan Ravitch, Steve Jackson, Eric Aderhold, Ben Liblit
• Keywords: General Terms Languages, PLDI 2009, Programming Languages, Python Programming Language