Supervision : Mesaac MAKPANGOU

Co-supervision : SHAPIRO Marc

Varda: a language for programming distributed systems by composition

Large distributed systems are often built by assembling off-the-shelf (OTS) components developed independently. The current approach is to interconnect their APIs manually. This is ad-hoc, complex, tedious, and error-prone.
To address this issue, Varda offers a higher-level language, motivated by a vision of safe-by design. To express a system, a programmer describes its architecture, involving OTS components, using well-defined entities and constraints. To provide safety, the compiler performs static verification, generates a correct-by-construction implementation and inject dynamic checks. To enhance programmers’ productivity, Varda offloads the boilerplate plumbing to the compiler. To improve performance, the compiler applies property-preserving optimisations (e.g., component inlining).
Our experiments show that Varda applications are compact, exhibit modular and reusable design, and have a modest run-time overhead.

2020-2023 Publications

• 2023
  • L. Prosperi : “Varda: a language for programming distributed systems by composition”, thesis, defence 09/05/2023, supervision Makpangou, Mesaac, co-supervision : Shapiro, Marc (2023)
  • B. Martin, L. Prosperi, M. Shapiro : “Transactional-Turn Causal Consistency”, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Limassol, Cyprus, (Springer) (2023)
• 2022
  • L. Prosperi, Ah. Bouajjani, M. Shapiro : “Varda: A Framework for Compositional Distributed Programming”, NETYS 2022: The 10^th International Conference on Networked Systems, vol. 13464, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Marrakech, Morocco, pp. 16-30, (Springer International Publishing), (ISBN: 978-3-031-17436-0) (2022)
• 2020
  • B. Martin, L. Prosperi, M. Shapiro : “An environment for composable distributed computing”, EuroDW 2020 - 14^th EuroSys Doctoral Workshop, Heraklion / Virtual, Greece (2020)