Pyramis: Domain Specific Language for Developing Multi-tier Systems

Abstract

Text-based specifications are the de-facto standard for specifying complex multi-tier systems. For example, 3GPP specifications define various interfaces, messages, and message processing at the multiple inter-connected nodes of a 5G system. These standards documents tend to be verbose, and may be ambiguous or inconsistent in places, increasing programmer effort to implement them in a general purpose language. This paper presents Pyramis, a Domain Specific Language (DSL) with suitable high-level abstractions for specifying the interfaces, messages, and processing in a multi-tier system. Pyramis allows programmers to specify multi-tier systems in a concise and precise manner, and enables easy development of software based on the specifications. We also develop a translator with Pyramis that automatically generates optimized, multi-threaded C++ code for the various components of the multi-tier system from the specification, and also generates eBPF-based measurement code for computing various performance metrics. We use Pyramis to build several components in the 5G mobile packet core. We show that the specifications written in Pyramis are 2–3 × smaller than the actual reference implementation, while the auto-generated C++ code performs on par with a hand-optimized implementation. We believe that Pyramis can eventually replace verbose text specifications like the 3GPP standards documents in telecom systems.