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A Readable TCP in the Prolac Protocol Language

Eddie Kohler, M. Frans Kaashoek, and David R. Montgomery
M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science

Prolac is a new statically-typed, object-oriented language for network protocol implementation. It is designed for readability, extensibility, and real-world implementation; most previous protocol languages, in contrast, have been based on hard-to-implement theoretical models and have focused on verification. We present a working Prolac TCP implemen- tation directly derived from 4.4BSD. Our implementation is modular - protocol processing is logically divided into minimally-interacting pieces; readable - Prolac encourages top-down structure and naming intermediate computations; and extensible - subclassing cleanly separates protocol ex- tensions like delayed acknowledgements and slow start. The Prolac compiler uses simple global analysis to remove expensive language features like dynamic dispatch, resulting in end-to-end performance comparable to an unmodified Linux 2.0 TCP.

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The referenced paper appears in Computer Communication Review, a publication of ACM SIGCOMM, volume 29, number 4, October 1999.

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