The Need for Programmability in Routing Protocols
• 11 min read
Networks change over time, and so do their needs. In response, network operators are constantly improving the services they offer, which often leads to proposals for new features to extend network protocols. To help speed up network innovation, we introduce xBGP, which allows all BGP implementation…
“Developping something new (no installed base) and mission-critical in C, today, is a bit strange. Why not using a safer language?”
The eBPF virtual machine we are using in this prototype only supports eBPF bytecode compiled from C source code. But I agree that other alternatives such as a WebAssembly VM or LUA would be a more viable and easier solution for production-ready implementations. WebAssembly is becoming more mature and allows extensions to be written in Rust code, which is much better than C in terms of memory safety and language abstraction. There are also are many interesting libraries such as WASIX, which supports many features that would simplify the process of developing new plugins/extensions.
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