NetPL 2018 - The NetPL workshop

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from two areas that are increasingly mutually relevant: programming languages and networking. The relevance of languages to computer networks has become apparent in recent years by the emergence of software-defined networking (SDN) and programmable data planes, which allow the behavior of the network to be controlled in software. Further, the increasing demands on and complexity of networks in the era of cloud services has exacerbated the need for network reliability and tools for reasoning about network behavior. However, while many aspects of networking can in principle be improved by suitable programming languages for expressing network policy and software verification tools for guaranteeing network properties, traditional programming languages techniques do not work “out of the box” for networks due to a range of theoretical and practical challenges. The goals of this workshop are to raise awareness in the POPL community of the relevance of languages to computer networks, to showcase recent research highlights in this area, and to identify and discuss current challenges in a way that is accessible to the POPL community.