P4 - Programming language

P4 is an open source programming language created in 2014.

#562on PLDB

10Years Old

574Repos

P4 is a programming language designed to allow programming of packet forwarding planes. In contrast to a general purpose language such as C or Python, P4 is a domain-specific language with a number of constructs optimized around network data forwarding. P4 is an open-source, permissively licensed language and is maintained by a non-profit organization called the P4 Language Consortium. Read more on Wikipedia...

Tags: programming language
There are at least 574 P4 repos on GitHub
Early development of P4 happened in Barefoot Networks and Intel and Stanford University and Princeton University and Google and Microsoft
The Google BigQuery Public Dataset GitHub snapshot shows 29 users using P4 in 38 repos on GitHub
GitHub supports syntax highlighting for P4
p4.org was registered in 2002
See also: (2 related languages) C, Python

Example from Linguist:

// Copyright 2015, Barefoot Networks, Inc.
//
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
// you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
// You may obtain a copy of the License at
//
//     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
//
// Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
// distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
// WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
// See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
// limitations under the License.

action set_mirror_id(session_id) {
    clone_ingress_pkt_to_egress(session_id);
}

table mirror_acl {
    reads {
        ingress_metadata.if_label : ternary;
        ingress_metadata.bd_label : ternary;

        /* ip acl */
        ingress_metadata.lkp_ipv4_sa : ternary;
        ingress_metadata.lkp_ipv4_da : ternary;
        ingress_metadata.lkp_ip_proto : ternary;

        /* mac acl */
        ingress_metadata.lkp_mac_sa : ternary;
        ingress_metadata.lkp_mac_da : ternary;
        ingress_metadata.lkp_mac_type : ternary;
    }
    actions {
        nop;
        set_mirror_id;
    }
    size : INGRESS_MIRROR_ACL_TABLE_SIZE;
}

Language features

Feature	Supported	Example	Token
MultiLine Comments	✓	/* A comment */	/* */
Comments	✓	// A comment
Line Comments	✓	// A comment	//
Semantic Indentation	X