research-article

Bypassing portability pitfalls of high-level low-level programming

Authors:

Stephen M. BlackburnAuthors Info & Claims

VMIL '12: Proceedings of the sixth ACM workshop on Virtual machines and intermediate languages

Pages 23 - 32

https://doi.org/10.1145/2414740.2414746

Published: 21 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Program portability is an important software engineering consideration. However, when high-level languages are extended to effectively implement system projects for software engineering gain and safety, portability is compromised--high-level code for low-level programming cannot execute on a stock runtime, and, conversely, a runtime with special support implemented will not be portable across different platforms.

We explore the portability pitfall of high-level low-level programming in the context of virtual machine implementation tasks. Our approach is designing a restricted high-level language called RJava, with a flexible restriction model and effective low-level extensions, which is suitable for different scopes of virtual machine implementation, and also suitable for a low-level language bypass for improved portability. Apart from designing such a language, another major outcome from this work is clearing up and sharpening the philosophy around language restriction in virtual machine design. In combination, our approach to solving portability pitfalls with RJava favors virtual machine design and implementation in terms of portability and robustness.

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Cited By

Qiao XWang LQin BChen HZhao S(2018)Privacy Protection Method Based on Access Control2018 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference (APSIPA ASC)10.23919/APSIPA.2018.8659546(254-259)Online publication date: Nov-2018
https://doi.org/10.23919/APSIPA.2018.8659546

Index Terms

Bypassing portability pitfalls of high-level low-level programming
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Runtime environments

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cover image ACM Conferences

VMIL '12: Proceedings of the sixth ACM workshop on Virtual machines and intermediate languages

October 2012

66 pages

ISBN:9781450316330

DOI:10.1145/2414740

Program Chair:
David Grove
IBM Research, USA

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 21 October 2012

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SPLASH '12: Conference on Systems, Programming, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 21, 2012

Arizona, Tucson, USA

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Cited By

Qiao XWang LQin BChen HZhao S(2018)Privacy Protection Method Based on Access Control2018 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference (APSIPA ASC)10.23919/APSIPA.2018.8659546(254-259)Online publication date: Nov-2018
https://doi.org/10.23919/APSIPA.2018.8659546

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