Reducing P4 language's voluminosity using higher-level constructs
Albert Gran Alcoz, Coralie Busse-Grawitz, Eric Marty, Laurent Vanbever · 2022
Over the last years, P4 has positioned itself as the primary language for data-plane programming. Despite its constant evolution, the P4 language still "suffers" from one significant limitation: the voluminosity of its code. P4 applications easily reach thousands of lines of code, becoming hard to develop, debug, and maintain. The reason is twofold: P4 requires many characters to express individual concepts (verbosity), and it relies on code repetition (lack of parametrization).