We are currently looking into the use of advanced programming language technology (such as extensible compilers, parsers and languages) to apply to the domain of networks. Is anyone aware of interesting research papers where advanced programming language technology is applied to the networking domain, or else of problems in the area of networking that could benefit from such a technology? For example, I know there is some programming languages related research going on in the domain of software-defined networks, such as the research on the P4 language.
I've just read the article "P4: programming protocol-independent packet processors" (http://www.sigcomm.org/node/3503) which gives a quite good and understandable description of what the P4 language is and what it can do. From what I understand from it, not being an expert on networking myself, the idea behind the P4 language is a more flexible way to describe for network switches what and how to process packets. It’s a kind of high-level configuration language, and a compiler should make sure it gets translated to the right low-level configuration for specific targets. This is supposed to be a step forwards towards software defined networks and provides more flexibility than the fixed set of headers and simple match/action tables currently proposed by the OpenFlow interface standard. It is true that the P4 language still seems to remain quite linked to the underlying concepts of headers and tables and actions, but that is not surprising since it is in a way a high-level expressive DSL for configuring switches in a more declarative or programmatic way. Building blocks of the language are header specifications, a description of how switches have to parse the packets (a programmatic way of defining a kind of state machine describing the transitions to be triggered by switches), a table specification and a specification of the corresponding actions, and finally a control program defining the control flow from one table to the next. What I couldn't get a feeling from (yet) from reading this article is how advanced and extensible the underlying programming technology would need to be to implement (compilers for) this language.
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