{"id":160531,"date":"2009-10-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/filet-o-fish-practical-and-dependable-domain-specific-languages-for-os-development\/"},"modified":"2020-11-10T09:08:51","modified_gmt":"2020-11-10T17:08:51","slug":"filet-o-fish-practical-and-dependable-domain-specific-languages-for-os-development","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/filet-o-fish-practical-and-dependable-domain-specific-languages-for-os-development\/","title":{"rendered":"Filet-o-Fish: Practical and Dependable Domain-Specific Languages for OS Development"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>We address a persistent problem with using domain-specific languages to write operating systems: the effort of implementing, checking, and debugging the DSL usually outweighs any of its benefits. Because these DSLs generate C by templated string concatenation, they are tedious to write, fragile, and incompatible with automated verification tools. We present Filet-o-Fish (FoF), a semantic language to ease DSL construction. Building a DSL using FoF consists of safely composing semantically-rich building blocks. This has several advantages: input files for the DSL are formal specifications of the system\u2019s functionality, automated testing of the DSL is possible via existing tools, and we can prove that the C code generated by a given DSL respects the semantics expected by the developer. Early experience has been good: FoF is in daily use as part of the tool chain of the Barrelfish multicore OS, which makes extensive use of domain-specific languages to generate low-level OS code. We have found that the ability to rapidly generate DSLs we can rely on has changed how we have designed the OS.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We address a persistent problem with using domain-specific languages to write operating systems: the effort of implementing, checking, and debugging the DSL usually outweighs any of its benefits. Because these DSLs generate C by templated string concatenation, they are tedious to write, fragile, and incompatible with automated verification tools. We present Filet-o-Fish (FoF), a semantic [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"ACM","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"Timothy Roscoe","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_award":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_institution":"","msr_host":"","msr_version":"","msr_duration":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_s2_match_type":"","msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_published_date":"2009-10-1","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_notes":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_conference_url":"","msr_journal_url":"","msr_s2_pdf_url":"","msr_year":0,"msr_citation_count":0,"msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_s2_match_confidence":0,"msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":true,"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_pub_ids":[],"msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13547],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-publisher":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-160531","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-systems-and-networking","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"ACM","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2009-10-1","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"207505","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Dagand_BR_09.pdf","id":"207505","title":"Dagand_BR_09.pdf","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_citation_count":0,"msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_pdf_url":null,"msr_attachments":[{"id":207505,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Dagand_BR_09.pdf"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Pierre-Evariste Dagand","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Andrew Baumann","user_id":31181,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Andrew Baumann"},{"type":"text","value":"Timothy Roscoe","user_id":0,"rest_url":false}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144927],"msr_project":[170320],"publication":[],"video":[],"msr-tool":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":170320,"post_title":"Barrelfish","post_name":"barrelfish","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2009-08-26 06:02:43","post_modified":"2025-05-31 07:12:12","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/barrelfish\/","post_excerpt":"Barrelfish is a new operating system being built from scratch in a collaboration between researchers at ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research, Cambridge. We are exploring how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems. The motivation is two closely related hardware trends: first, the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to scalability challenges, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources. 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