Semantic Soundness for Language Interoperability

Programs are rarely implemented in a single language, and thus questions of type soundness should address not only the semantics of a single language, but how it interacts with others. Even between type-safe languages, disparate features frustrate interoperability, as invariants from one language can easily be violated in the other. In their seminal 2007 paper, Matthews and Findler proposed a multi-language construction that augments the interoperating languages with a pair of boundaries that allow code from one language to be embedded in the other. While the technique has been widely applied, their syntactic source-level interoperability doesn't reflect practical implementations, where behavior of interaction is defined after compilation to a common target, and any safety must be ensured by target invariants or inserted target-level "glue code." In this paper, we present a framework for the design and verification of sound language interoperability that follows an interoperation-after-compilation strategy. Language designers specify what data can be converted between types of the languages via a relation $\tau_A \sim \tau_B$ and specify target glue code implementing conversions. Then, by giving a semantic model of source types as sets of target terms, we can establish soundness of conversions: i.e., whenever $\tau_A \sim \tau_B$, the corresponding pair of conversions convert target terms that behave as $\tau_A$ to target terms that behave as $\tau_B$, and vice versa. We can then prove semantic type soundness for the entire system. We illustrate our framework via a series of case studies that demonstrate how our semantic interoperation-after-compilation approach allows us both to account for complex differences in language semantics and make efficiency trade-offs based on particularities of compilers or targets.
Comment: revised version with more exposition, typos fixed, etc