NDL: The Network Device Language

NOTE: NDL is not currently maintained.

NDL is a domain-specific language for creating device drivers. The language itself is still being developed and no specification is available yet. The goals of the NDL project are:

• Simple, robust drivers - NDL will be high-level and type-safe. Common C problems like buffer overflows and null pointers will be prevented by the NDL compiler.
• High performace - NDL will use domain-specific optimization strategies to equal or better the performance of hand-coded C drivers.
• Write once, run anywhere - Well, not anywhere. Drivers are tradionally very platform-centric. NDL will eliminate platform dependencies as much as possible by focusing on device behavior and pushing OS interactions into platform libraries. The initial versions of the NDL compiler will concentrate on Linux and BSD. Other platforms will follow.

If you want to know more, you can look over the following. Caveat: NDL is a work in progress. Much of what is said has changed or will change.

Paper

Christopher L. Conway and Stephen A. Edwards. NDL: A Domain-Specific Language for Device Drivers. In the proceedings of the ACM Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES), Washington, DC, June 11-13, 2004. (PDF)

Presentations

• The NDL Language (Spring 04). PDF 9-up (PDF)
• Optimizing NDL (Spring 03). PDF PowerPoint

Getting NDL

NOTE: NDL is not currently maintained.

• Launchpad home page
• Downloads
• Report a bug
• Source repository: bzr branch lp:ndl

If you have any questions, contact Chris Conway.