Programmers combine different programming languages because it allows them to use the most suitable language for a given problem, to gradually migrate existing projects from one language to another, or to reuse existing source code. However, existing cross-language mechanisms suffer from complex interfaces, insufficient flexibility, or poor performance. We present the TruffleVM, a multi-language runtime that allows composing different language implementations in a seamless way. It reduces the amount of required boiler-plate code to a minimum by allowing programmers to access foreign functions or objects by using the notation of the host language. We compose language implementations that translate source code to an intermediate representation (IR), which is executed on top of a shared runtime system. Language implementations use language-independent messages that the runtime resolves at their first execution by transforming them to efficient foreign-language-specific operations. The TruffleVM avoids conversion or marshaling of foreign objects at the language boundary and allows the dynamic compiler to perform its optimizations across language boundaries, which guarantees high performance. This paper presents an implementation of our ideas based on the Truffle system and its guest language implementations JavaScript, Ruby, and C.

In C, memory errors, such as buffer overflows, are among the most dangerous software errors; as we show, they are still on the rise. Current dynamic bug-finding tools that try to detect such errors are based on the low-level execution model of the underlying machine. They insert additional checks in an ad-hoc fashion, which makes them prone to omitting checks for corner cases. To address this, we devised a novel approach to finding bugs during the execution of a program. At the core of this approach is an interpreter written in a high-level language that performs automatic checks (such as bounds, NULL, and type checks). By mapping data structures in C to those of the high-level language, accesses are automatically checked and bugs discovered. We have implemented this approach and show that our tool (called Safe Sulong) can find bugs that state-of-the-art tools overlook, such as out-of-bounds accesses to the main function arguments.