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Implementations of domain-specific languages should offer both extensibility and performance optimizations. With the new syntax-spec metalanguage in Racket, programmers can easily create DSL implementations that are both automatically macro-extensible and subject to conventional compiler optimizations. This pearl illustrates this approach through a new implementation of miniKanren, a widely used relational programming DSL. The miniKanren community has explored, in separate implementations, optimization techniques and a wide range of extensions. We demonstrate how our new miniKanren implementation with syntax-spec reconciles these features in a single implementation that comes with both an optimizing compiler and an extension mechanism. Furthermore, programmers using the new implementation benefit from the same seamless integration between Racket and miniKanren as in existing shallow embeddings.
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This content will become publicly available on June 20, 2025
NetBlocks: Staging Layouts for High-Performance Custom Host Network Stacks
Modern network applications and environments, ranging from data centers and IoT devices to AR/VR headsets and underwater robotics, present diverse requirements that cannot be satisfied by the all or-nothing approach of TCP and UDP protocols. Network researchers and engineers need to create highly tailored protocols targeting individual problem domains. Existing library-based approaches either fall short on the flexibility in features or offer them at a significant performance overhead. To address this challenge, we present NetBlocks, a domain-specific language, and compiler for designing ad-hoc protocols and generating their highly optimized host network stack implementations. NetBlocks DSL input allows users to configure protocols by selecting and customizing features. Unlike other DSL compilers, NetBlocks also allows network researchers to extend the system and add more features easily without any prior compiler knowledge. Our design and implementation employ a high-performance Aspect-Oriented Programming framework written with the staging framework BuildIt. We also introduce a novel Layout Customization Layer that allows staging packet layouts alongside the implementation, which is critical for getting the best performance out of the protocol when possible, while allowing the practitioners to maintain compatibility with existing protocol layers where needed. Our evaluations on three applications ranging across deployments in data centers and underwater acoustic networks demonstrate a trade-off between performance (both latency and throughput) and selected features allowing the user to only pay-for what-they-use.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2107244
- PAR ID:
- 10533917
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- PLDI
- ISSN:
- 2475-1421
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 467 to 491
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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