Using functional programming within an industrial product group

ScottDavid,; SharpRichard,; GazagnaireThomas,; MadhavapeddyAnil,

doi:10.1145/1932681.1863557

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Before developing Cmeleon, we found writing OCaml foreign function bindings tedious and punctuated by the frustration and confusion of subtly violated representation invariants [25]. From Table 1: Some bindings using Cmeleon remembering when the GC runs to ensuring that values are appropriately boxed and unboxed to registering GC roots and callbacks, writing and maintaining a binding used to be a lot of work.…”

Section: Binding Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A modular foreign function interface

Yallop

Sheets

Madhavapeddy

2018

Science of Computer Programming

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Foreign function interfaces (FFIs) between high-level languages and system libraries typically intertwine the actions of describing the interface of a system library and selecting a binding strategy for linking to it. This tight coupling makes it difficult for programmers to switch between different binding strategies, and discourages the development of new approaches to binding, since more exotic approaches are unlikely to attract sufficient users to justify the cost of development.We present Cmeleon, a replacement for the standard OCaml FFI that exposes typed constructors that correspond to the operations of the type algebra of C, and binding strategies that interpret this type structure as separate program stages. Cmeleon parameterises external calls across binding strategies, isolating interface descriptions from choices relating to call construction (code generation vs dynamic call frames), concurrency style (blocking, cooperatively or preemptively threaded), and separation (in-process, address space or a network connection).This flexibility enables significant code reuse of bindings in many different contexts, from rapid interactive development in a REPL to production deployments with generated code and privilege separation. Cmeleon has been used for the past two years to bind to a broad variety of real-world OCaml libraries, and entirely supplants the need for the low-level C FFI for the vast majority of applications.

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Section: Binding Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A modular foreign function interface

Yallop

Sheets

Madhavapeddy

2018

Science of Computer Programming

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“…This paper describes our experiences in addressing this problem of writing high level code that can run in heterogenous execution environments by using OCaml's powerful abstraction facilities within the MirageOS unikernel framework. MirageOS has been developed since 2006 and has seen widespread deployment in industrial projects such as Xen [Gazagnaire and Hanquez 2009;Scott et al 2010] and Docker. Over the last decade, MirageOS has grown to support a highly diverse set of target platforms including hypervisors such as Xen [Barham et al 2003], KVM [Kivity et al 2007] and Muen [Buerki and Rueegsegger 2013], plus conventional Unix and Windows binaries, and even experimental compilation to JavaScript and bare-metal booting on RISC-V and ARM boards.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Programming Unikernels in the Large via Functor Driven Development

Radanne¹,

Gazagnaire²,

Madhavapeddy³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Compiling applications as unikernels allows them to be tailored to diverse execution environments. Dependency on a monolithic operating system is replaced with linkage against libraries that provide specific services. Doing so in practice has revealed a major barrier: managing the configuration matrix across heterogenous execution targets. A realistic unikernel application depends on hundreds of libraries, each of which may place different demands on the different target execution platforms (e.g., cryptographic acceleration).We propose a modular approach to structuring large scale codebases that cleanly separates configuration, application and operating system logic. Our implementation is built on the MirageOS unikernel framework, using the OCaml language's powerful abstraction and metaprogramming facilities. Leveraging modules allows us to build many components independently, with only loose coupling through a set of standardised signatures. Components can be parameterized by other components and composed. Our approach accounts for state, dependency ordering, and error management, and our usage over the years has demonstrated significant efficiency benefits by leveraging compiler features such as global link-time optimisation during the configuration process. We describe our application architecture and experiences via some practical applications of our approach, and discuss how library development in MirageOS can facilitate adoption in other unikernel frameworks and programming languages.

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Using functional programming within an industrial product group

Cited by 2 publications

References 11 publications

A modular foreign function interface

A modular foreign function interface

Programming Unikernels in the Large via Functor Driven Development

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