Jeannie: granting java native interface developers their wishes

ABSTRACT

Higher-level languages interface with lower-level languages such as C to access platform functionality, reuse legacy libraries, or improve performance. This raises the issue of how to best integrate different languages while also reconciling productivity, safety, portability, and efficiency. This paper presents Jeannie, a new language design for integrating Java with C. In Jeannie, both Javaand C code are nested within each other in the same file and compile down to JNI, the Java platform's standard foreign function interface. By combining the two languages' syntax and semantics, Jeannie eliminates verbose boiler-plate code, enables static error detection across the language boundary, and simplifies dynamic resource management. We describe the Jeannie language and its compiler, while also highlighting lessons from composing two mature programming languages.

REFERENCES

• 1: R. Anisko, V. David, and C. Vasseur. Transformers: a C++ program transformation framework. Tech. Report 0310, Laboratoire de Recherche et D& 233;veloppement de l'Epita, Le Kremlin-Bicêtre cedex, France, May 2004.
• 2: Mockingbird: Flexible Stub Compilation from Pairs of Declarations, Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, p.393, May 31-June 04, 1999
• 3: Jonthan Bachrach , Keith Playford, The Java syntactic extender (JSE), Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.31-42, October 14-18, 2001, Tampa Bay, FL, USA
• 4: Jason Baker , Wilson C. Hsieh, Maya: multiple-dispatch syntax extension in Java, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 17-19, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 5: S. S. Bakken, A. Aulbach, E. Schmid, J. Winstead, L. T. Wilson, R. Lefdorf, A. Zmievski, and J. Ahto. PHP Manual. PHP Documentation Group, Feb. 2004. http://www.php.net/manual/.
• 6: Daniel J. Barrett , Alan Kaplan , Jack C. Wileden, Automated support for seamless interoperability in polylingual software systems, Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Foundations of software engineering, p.147-155, October 16-18, 1996, San Francisco, California, United States
• 7: David M. Beazley, SWIG: an easy to use tool for integrating scripting languages with C and C++, Proceedings of the 4th conference on USENIX Tcl/Tk Workshop, 1996, p.15-15, July 10-13, 1996, Monterey, California
• 8: G. Bierman, E. Meijer, and W. Schulte. The essence of data access in CΩ. In Proc. 19th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, vol. 3586 of LNCS, pp. 287--311, July 2005.
• 9: J. Blosser. Java tip 98: Reflect on the visitor design pattern. JavaWorld, July 2000. http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/javatips/jw-javatip98.html.
• 10: M. Blume. No-longer foreign: Teaching an ML compiler to speak C ``natively''. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 59(1):36--52, Sept. 2001.
• 11: C. Brabrand, M. I. Schwartzbach, and M. Vanggaard. The metafront system: Extensible parsing and transformation. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 82(3):592--611, Dec. 2003.
• 12: Martin Bravenboer , Éric Tanter , Eelco Visser, Declarative, formal, and extensible syntax definition for aspectJ, Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, October 22-26, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA
• 13: Martin Bravenboer , Arthur van Dam , Karina Olmos , Eelco Visser, Program Transformation with Scoped Dynamic Rewrite Rules, Fundamenta Informaticae, v.69 n.1-2, p.123-178, January 2006
• 14: Martin Bravenboer , Eelco Visser, Concrete syntax for objects: domain-specific language embedding and assimilation without restrictions, Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, October 24-28, 2004, Vancouver, BC, Canada
• 15: M. Bubak, D. Kurzyniec, and P. Luszczek. Creating Java to native code interfaces with Janet extension. In Proc. SGI Users's Conference, pp. 283--294, Oct. 2000.
• 16: L. Cardelli, F. Matthes, and M. Abadi. Extensible syntax with lexical scoping. Tech. Report 121, Digital Equipment, Systems Research Center, Feb. 1994.
• 17: M. Chakravarty, S. Finne, F. Henderson, M. Kowalczyk, D. Leijen, S. Marlow, E. Meijer, S. Panne, S. P. Jones, A. Reid, M. Wallace, and M. Weber. The Haskell 98 foreign function interface 1.0. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/ffi/, 2003.
• 18: Miaobo Chen , Shalom Goldenberg , Suresh Srinivas , Valery Ushakov , Young Wang , Qi Zhang , Eric Lin , Yoav Zach, Java JNI Bridge: A Framework for Mixed Native ISA Execution, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, p.65-75, March 26-29, 2006 [doi>10.1109/CGO.2006.22]
• 19: Jeremy Condit , Matthew Harren , Scott McPeak , George C. Necula , Westley Weimer, CCured in the real world, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 09-11, 2003, San Diego, California, USA
• 20: Torbjörn Ekman , Görel Hedin, The jastadd extensible java compiler, Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming systems and applications, October 21-25, 2007, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• 21: K. Fisher, R. Pucella, and J. Reppy. A framework for interoperability. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 59(1):3--19, Sept. 2001.
• 22: Marc E. Fiuczynski , Robert Grimm , Yvonne Coady , David Walker, patch (1) considered harmful, Proceedings of the 10th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, p.16-16, June 12-15, 2005, Santa Fe, NM
• 23: M. Furr and J. S. Foster. Polymorphic type inference for the JNI. In Proc. 15th European Symposium on Programming, pp. 309--324, Mar. 2006.
• 24: Erich Gamma , Richard Helm , Ralph Johnson , John Vlissides, Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
• 25: Steven E. Ganz , Amr Sabry , Walid Taha, Macros as multi-stage computations: type-safe, generative, binding macros in MacroML, Proceedings of the sixth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming, September 03-05, 2001, Florence, Italy
• 26: V. Gapeyev, M. Y. Levin, B. C. Pierce, and A. Schmitt. XML goes native: Run-time representations for xtatic. In Proc. 14th International Conference on Compiler Construction, vol. 3443 of LNCS, pp. 43--58, Apr. 2005.
• 27: James Gosling , Bill Joy , Guy L. Steele, The Java Language Specification, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1996
• 28: R. Grimm. xtc (eXTensible C). http://cs.nyu.edu/rgrimm/xtc/.
• 29: Robert Grimm, Better extensibility through modular syntax, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 11-14, 2006, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• 30: C. Grothoff. Walkabout revisited: The runabout. In Proc. 17th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, vol. 2743 of LNCS, pp. 101--125, July 2003.
• 31: Matthew Harren , Mukund Raghavachari , Oded Shmueli , Michael G. Burke , Rajesh Bordawekar , Igor Pechtchanski , Vivek Sarkar, XJ: facilitating XML processing in Java, Proceedings of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web, May 10-14, 2005, Chiba, Japan [doi>10.1145/1060745.1060788]
• 32: G. Hedin. The JastAdd extensible Java compiler. http://jastadd.cs.lth.se/web/extjava/index.shtml.
• 33: L. Huelsbergen. A portable C interface for Standard ML of New Jersey. Tech. report, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Jan. 1996. http://www.smlnj.org/doc/SMLNJ--C/smlnj-c.ps.
• 34: International Organization for Standardization. Information Technology--Programming Languages-C. ISO/IEC Standard 9899:TC2, May 2005.
• 35: Alan Kaplan , John Bubba , Jack C. Wileden, The Exu Approach to Safe, Transparent and Lightweight Interoperability, Proceedings of the 25th International Computer Software and Applications Conference on Invigorating Software Development, p.393-394, October 08-12, 2001
• 36: D. Kurzyniec. Creating Java to native code interfaces with Janet extension. Master's thesis, University of Mining and Metallurgy, Kraków, Poland, Aug. 2000. http://janet-project.sourceforge.net/papers/janet_msc.pdf.
• 37: X. Leroy, D. Doligez, J. Garrigue, D. Rémy, and J. Vouillon. The Objective Caml system release 3.09. http://caml.inria.fr/, Oct. 2005.
• 38: Sheng Liang, Java Native Interface: Programmer's Guide and Reference, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
• 39: J. Lind-Nielsen. BuDDy. http://buddy.sourceforge.net/.
• 40: Bill McCloskey , Eric Brewer, ASTEC: a new approach to refactoring C, Proceedings of the 10th European software engineering conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, September 05-09, 2005, Lisbon, Portugal
• 41: Erik Meijer , Brian Beckman , Gavin Bierman, LINQ: reconciling object, relations and XML in the .NET framework, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, June 27-29, 2006, Chicago, IL, USA [doi>10.1145/1142473.1142552]
• 42: Todd Millstein, Practical predicate dispatch, Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, October 24-28, 2004, Vancouver, BC, Canada
• 43: George C. Necula , Scott McPeak , Shree Prakash Rahul , Westley Weimer, CIL: Intermediate Language and Tools for Analysis and Transformation of C Programs, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Compiler Construction, p.213-228, April 08-12, 2002
• 44: N. Nystrom, M. R. Clarkson, and A. C. Myers. Polyglot: An extensible compiler framework for Java. In Proc. 12th International Conference on Compiler Construction, vol. 2622 of LNCS, pp. 138--152. Springer, Apr. 2003.
• 45: Nathaniel Nystrom , Xin Qi , Andrew C. Myers, J&: nested intersection for scalable software composition, Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, October 22-26, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA
• 46: John Reppy , Chunyan Song, Application-specific foreign-interface generation, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Generative programming and component engineering, October 22-26, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1173706.1173714]
• 47: John R. Rose , Hans Muller, Integrating the Scheme and C languages, Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming, p.247-259, June 22-24, 1992, San Francisco, California, United States
• 48: M. Roth and E. Pelegrí-Llopart. JavaServer Pages specification version 2.0. Tech. report, Sun Microsystems, Nov. 2003.
• 49: A. Shalit. The Dylan Reference Manual. Addison-Wesley, Sept. 1996.
• 50: Tim Sheard , Simon Peyton Jones, Template meta-programming for Haskell, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.37 n.12, December 2002 [doi>10.1145/636517.636528]
• 51: Levon Stepanian , Angela Demke Brown , Allan Kielstra , Gita Koblents , Kevin Stoodley, Inlining java native calls at runtime, Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments, June 11-12, 2005, Chicago, IL, USA [doi>10.1145/1064979.1064997]
• 52: Sun Microsystems. Java native interface specification, release 1.1, Jan. 1997.
• 53: Sun Microsystems. Integrating native methods into Java programs. http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorialNB/download/tut-native1dot0.zip, May 1998.
• 54: G. Tan, A. W. Appel, S. Chakradhar, A. Raghunathan, S. Ravi, and D. Wang. Safe Java native interface. In Proc. 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Secure Software Engineering, pp. 97--106, Mar. 2006.
• 55: Gang Tan , Greg Morrisett, Ilea: inter-language analysis across java and c, Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming systems and applications, October 21-25, 2007, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• 56: Mark G. J. van den Brand , Jeroen Scheerder , Jurgen J. Vinju , Eelco Visser, Disambiguation Filters for Scannerless Generalized LR Parsers, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Compiler Construction, p.143-158, April 08-12, 2002
• 57: E. Visser. Syntax Definition for Language Prototyping. PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, Sept. 1997.
• 58: Joost Visser, Visitor combination and traversal control, Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.270-282, October 14-18, 2001, Tampa Bay, FL, USA
• 59: Daniel Weise , Roger Crew, Programmable syntax macros, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1993 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.156-165, June 21-25, 1993, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
• 60: J. Whaley. JavaBDD. http://javabdd.sourceforge.net/.
• 61: M. Yuen, M. Fiuczynski, R. Grimm, Y. Coady, and D. Walker. Making extensibility of system software practical with the C4 toolkit. In Proc. AOSD Workshop on Software Engineering Properties of Languages and Aspect Technologies, Mar. 2006.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.12 Interoperability
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors

General Terms:
Design, Languages

Keywords:
C, JNI, foreign function interface, java, modular syntax, programming language composition, rats!, xtc