@inproceedings{madhavapeddy2007melange,
author = {Madhavapeddy, Anil and Ho, Alex and Deegan, Tim and Scott, David and Sohan, Ripduman},
title = {Melange: creating a “functional” Internet},
booktitle = {2nd EuroSys},
year = {2007},
month = {March},
abstract = {Most implementations of critical Internet protocols are written in type-unsafe languages such as C or C++ and are regularly vulnerable to serious security and reliability problems. Type-safe languages eliminate many errors but are not used to due to the perceived performance overheads. 
We combine two techniques to eliminate this performance penalty in a practical fashion: strong static typing and generative meta-programming. Static typing eliminates run-time type information by checking safety at compile-time and minimises dynamic checks. Meta-programming uses a single specification to abstract the low-level code required to transmit and receive packets. 
Our domain-specific language, MPL, describes Internet packet protocols and compiles into fast, zero-copy code for both parsing and creating these packets. MPL is designed for implementing quirky Internet protocols ranging from the low-level: Ethernet, IPv4, ICMP and TCP; to the complex application-level: SSH, DNS and BGP; and even file-system protocols such as 9P. 
We report on fully-featured SSH and DNS servers constructed using MPL and our OCaml framework “Melange”, and measure greater throughput, lower latency, better flexibility and more succinct source code than their C equivalents OpenSSH and BIND. Our quantitative analysis shows that the benefits of MPL-generated code overcomes the additional overheads of automatic garbage collection and dynamic bounds checking. Qualitatively, the flexibility of our approach shows that dramatic optimisations are easily possible.},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/melange-creating-a-functional-internet/},
}