Melange: creating a "functional" internet / Jun 2007
Won best student paper for my PhD work on a high-performance functional packet parsing DSL at Eurosys 2007! The Melange work combined strong static typing with generative meta-programming to create MPL, a domain-specific language for describing Internet packet protocols. Our approach generated fast, zero-copy code that outperformed C implementations - we built fully-featured SSH and DNS servers that showed greater throughput and lower latency than OpenSSH and BIND. The work demonstrated that type-safe languages could eliminate the performance penalty typically associated with memory safety, opening the door to more secure protocol implementations.