Multiple Language Family Support for Programmable Network Systems

During the last couple of years, the research community of active and programmable networks discussed the deployment of such systems. One shortcoming of most systems is the limitation of programming languages they support. This paper will introduce a possibility how different programming languages and different programming paradigms can be supported within a programmable network system. We will motivate why such a support will increase the people capable of writing services for such systems significantly. We incorporated support for three major programming paradigms into the FlexiNet system: compiled programming languages like C interpreted languages like Java and hardware description languages like VHDL. We will show the feasibility that service modules programmed in different languages can cooperate and that in this way the fortes of each language can be utilized. Further, we present how we seamlessly incorporated that support into our system in view to configuration. Finally, we will show interesting measurement results of a performance comparison between service modules implemented in C and Java. Surprisingly the Java implementation is up to native C.