The next 700 network programming languages

Abstract

Specification and verification of computer networks has become a reality in recent years, with the emergence of domain-specific programming languages and automated reasoning tools. But the design of these frameworks has been largely ad hoc, driven more by the needs of applications and the capabilities of hardware than by any foundational principles. This talk will present NetKAT, a language for programming networks based on a well-studied mathematical foundation: regular languages and finite automata. The talk will describe the design of the language, discuss its semantic underpinnings, and present highlights from ongoing work extending the language with stateful and probabilistic features.