The Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) is a sandboxed virtual machine that runs on operating systems with kernel privileges. Currently, eBPF programs are either translated from a subset of C, called Restricted C, or from bindings available for languages such as Rust or Python. This paper describes Honey Potion, a compiler that compiles Elixir to eBPF binaries. Translation is challenging, for it must not only preserve semantics, but also satisfy the eBPF verifier, which requires proofs of in-bounds memory accesses and termination. The translator relies heavily on this last constraint---ensured termination---to implement different optimizations: constant propagation, type specialization and partial evaluation. Honey Potion is publicly available, and has been used in the development of many eBPF applications, such as packet routers, process monitors and event loggers. To the best of our knowledge, Honey Potion is the first translator of a functional programming language to eBPF.

This paper addresses the problem of accessing external resources from inside transactions in STM Haskell, and for that purpose introduces a new abstraction called Open Transactional Actions (OTAs) that provides a framework for wrapping non-transactional resources in a transactional layer. OTAs allow the programmer to access resources through IO actions, from inside transactions, and also to register commit and abort handlers: the former are used to make the accesses to resources visible to other transactions at commit time, and the latter to undo changes in the resource if the transaction has to roll back. OTAs, once started, are guaranteed to be executed completely before the hosting transaction can be aborted, guarantying that if a resource is accessed, its respective commit and abort actions will be properly registered. We believe that OTAs could be used by expert programmers to implement useful system libraries and also to give a transactional semantics to fast linearizable data structures, i.e., transactional boosting. As a proof of concept, we present examples that use OTAs to implement transactional file access and transactional boosted data types that are faster than pure STM Haskell in most cases.

Type inference is a feature that is common to a variety of programming languages. While, in the past, it has been prominently present in functional ones (e.g., ML and Haskell), today, many object-oriented/multi-paradigm languages such as C# and C++ offer, to a certain extent, such a feature. Nevertheless, type inference still is an unexplored subject in the realm of C. In particular, it remains open whether it is possible to devise a technique that encompasses the idiosyncrasies of this language. The first difficulty encountered when tackling this problem is that parsing C requires, not only syntactic, but also semantic information. Yet, greater challenges emerge due to C’s intricate type system. In this work, we present a unification-based framework that lets us infer the missing struct, union, enum, and typedef declarations in a program. As an application of our technique, we investigate the reconstruction of partial programs. Incomplete source code naturally appears in software development: during design and while evolving, testing, and analyzing programs; therefore, understanding it is a valuable asset. With a reconstructed well-typed program, one can: (i) enable static analysis tools in scenarios where components are absent; (ii) improve precision of “zero setup” static analysis tools; (iii) apply stub generators, symbolic executors, and testing tools on code snippets; and (iv) provide engineers with an assortment of compilable benchmarks for performance and correctness validation. We evaluate our technique on code from a variety of C libraries, including GNU’s Coreutils and on snippets from popular projects such as CPython, FreeBSD, and Git.

Incomplete source code naturally emerges in software development: during the design phase, while evolving, testing and analyzing programs. Therefore, the ability to understand partial programs is a valuable asset. However, this problem is still unsolved in the C programming language. Difficulties stem from the fact that parsing C requires, not only syntax, but also semantic information. Furthermore, inferring types so that they respect C's type system is a challenging task. In this paper we present a technique that lets us solve these problems. We provide a unification-based type inference capable of dealing with C intricacies. The ideas we present let us reconstruct partial C programs into complete well-typed ones. Such program reconstruction has several applications: enabling static analysis tools in scenarios where software components may be absent; improving static analysis tools that do not rely on build-specifications; allowing stub-generation and testing tools to work on snippets; and assisting programmers on the extraction of reusable data-structures out of the program parts that use them. Our evaluation is performed on source code from a variety of C libraries such as GNU's Coreutils, GNULib, GNOME's GLib, and GDSL; on implementations from Sedgewick's books; and on snippets from popular open-source projects like CPython, FreeBSD, and Git.