An Empirical Study of Cross-Language Interoperability in Replicated Data Systems

TL;DR

This study empirically compares foreign-function interface and common data format strategies for integrating replicated data libraries across multiple programming languages, revealing CDF's advantages in software quality and performance.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical analysis of RDL integration strategies in multilingual distributed systems, highlighting CDF's benefits over FFI.

Findings

CDF improves latency, memory, throughput, and software quality.

CDF-based RDLs support mixed language environments effectively.

Plug-in extensibility enhances RDL functionality in multilingual systems.

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Modern distributed systems replicate data across multiple execution sites. Business requirements and resource constraints often necessitate mixing different languages across replica sites. To facilitate the management of replicated data, modern software engineering practices integrate special-purpose replicated data libraries (RDLs) that provide read-write access to the data and ensure its synchronization. Irrespective of the implementation languages, an RDL typically uses a single language or offers bindings to a designated one. Hence, integrating existing RDLs in multilingual environments requires special-purpose code, whose software quality and performance characteristics are poorly understood. AIMS: We aim to bridge this knowledge gap to understand the software quality and performance characteristics of RDL integration in multilingual environments. METHOD: We conduct an empirical study of two key strategies for integrating RDLs in the context of multilingual replicated data systems: foreign-function interface (FFI) and a common data format (CDF); we measure and compare their respective software metrics and performance to understand their suitability for the task at hand. RESULTS: Our results reveal that adopting CDF for cross-language interaction offers software quality, latency, memory consumption, and throughput advantages. We further validate our findings by (1) creating a CDF-based RDL for mixing compiled, interpreted, and managed languages; and (2) enhancing our RDL with plug-in extensibility that enables adding functionality in a single language while maintaining integration within a multilingual environment. CONCLUSIONS: With modern distributed systems utilizing multiple languages, our findings provide novel insights for designing RDLs in multilingual replicated data systems.