Applying Prolog to Develop Distributed Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces DAHL, a Prolog-based system that extends Prolog with event-driven control and networking, demonstrating its effectiveness in developing distributed systems through various implementations.

Contribution

It presents a novel Prolog-based framework, DAHL, for declarative distributed system development, integrating event-driven control and networking capabilities.

Findings

DAHL successfully implements a distributed hash-table.

It supports protocols for Byzantine fault tolerance.

It enables distributed software model checking.

Abstract

Development of distributed systems is a difficult task. Declarative programming techniques hold a promising potential for effectively supporting programmer in this challenge. While Datalog-based languages have been actively explored for programming distributed systems, Prolog received relatively little attention in this application area so far. In this paper we present a Prolog-based programming system, called DAHL, for the declarative development of distributed systems. DAHL extends Prolog with an event-driven control mechanism and built-in networking procedures. Our experimental evaluation using a distributed hash-table data structure, a protocol for achieving Byzantine fault tolerance, and a distributed software model checker - all implemented in DAHL - indicates the viability of the approach.