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Reasoning About Foreign Function Interfaces Without Modelling the Foreign Language Turcotte, Alexi Arteca, Ellen Richards, Gregor Formal Semantics Language Interoperation Lua C Foreign Function Interfaces Foreign function interfaces (FFIs) allow programs written in one language (called the host language) to call functions written in another language (called the guest language), and are widespread throughout modern programming languages, with C FFIs being the most prevalent. Unfortunately, reasoning about C FFIs can be very challenging, particularly when using traditional methods which necessitate a full model of the guest language in order to guarantee anything about the whole language. To address this, we propose a framework for defining whole language semantics of FFIs without needing to model the guest language, which makes reasoning about C FFIs feasible. We show that with such a semantics, one can guarantee some form of soundness of the overall language, as well as attribute errors in well-typed host language programs to the guest language. We also present an implementation of this scheme, Poseidon Lua, which shows a speedup over a traditional Lua C FFI. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Alexi Turcotte and Ellen Arteca and Gregor Richards 2019 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 134, 33rd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.16 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-108087 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2019.16 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode