Compiling PLAN to SNAP

PLAN (Packet Language for Active Networks) [ 3 ] is a highly flexible and usable active packet language, whereas SNAP (Safe and Nimble Active Packets) [ 12 ] offers significant resource usage safety and achieves much higher performance compared to PLAN, but at the cost of flexibility and usability. Ideally, we would like to combine the good properties of PLAN with those of SNAP. We have achieved this end by developing a compiler that translates PLANi nto SNAP. The compiler allows us to achieve the flexibility and usability of PLAN, but with the safety and efficiency of SNAP. In this paper, we describe both languages, highlighting the features that require special compilation techniques. We then present the details of our compiler and experimental results to evaluate our compiler with respect to code size.