Transparent Replication Using Metaprogramming in Cyan

TL;DR

This paper presents a metaprogramming approach in Cyan that simplifies the development of fault-tolerant active replicated services by abstracting replication complexities through annotations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel use of Cyan's metaprogramming features to hide replication details, making fault-tolerant service creation more accessible.

Findings

Metaprogramming reduces complexity in replication implementation.

Annotations facilitate easier development of replicated applications.

Enhanced fault-tolerance through simplified programming model.

Abstract

Replication can be used to increase the availability of a service by creating many operational copies of its data called replicas. Active replication is a form of replication that has strong consistency semantics, easier to reason about and program. However, creating replicated services using active replication still demands from the programmer the knowledge of subtleties of the replication mechanism. In this paper we show how to use the metaprogramming infrastructure of the Cyan language to shield the application programmer from these details, allowing easier creation of fault-tolerant replicated applications through simple annotations.