Typed common intermediate format

Abstract

Application languages are very e ective in solving speci c software problems. Unfortunately, they pose great challenges to reliable and e cient implementations. In fact, most existing application languages are slow, interpreted, and have poor interoperability with general-purpose languages. This paper presents a framework on building highquality systems environment for multiple advanced languages. Our key innovation is the use of a common typed intermediate language, named FLINT, to model the semantics and interactions of various language-speci c features. FLINT is based on a predicative variant of the Girard-Reynolds polymorphic calculus F!, extended with a very rich set of primitive types and functions. FLINT provides a common compiler infrastructure that can be quickly adapted to generate compilers for new general-purpose and domain-speci c languages. With its single uni ed type system, FLINT serves as a great platform for reasoning about crosslanguage interoperations. FLINT types act as a glue to connect language features that complicate interoperability, such as mixed data representations, multiple function calling conventions, and di erent memory management protocols. In addition, because all runtime representations are determined by FLINT types, languages compiled under FLINT can share the same system-wide garbage collector and foreign function call interface.