Understanding Tradeoffs of Replicated Data Library Integration Strategies in Multilingual Environments

Abstract

Modern distributed systems replicate data across multiple execution sites by means of special-purpose replicated data libraries (RDLs), which provide read-write data access and synchronization. Programming languages often need to be mixed across replica sites to meet business requirements and resource constraints. Because RDLs are typically written in a single language, integrating them in multilingual environments requires special-purpose code, whose characteristics are poorly understood. We aim to bridge this knowledge gap by reviewing two key strategies for integrating RDLs in multilingual environments: (1) foreign-function interface (FFI) and (2) common data format (CDF). Our preliminary results indicate performance and implementation tradeoffs: CDF offers latency and memory consumption advantages, while incurring an additional implementation burden. With modern distributed systems utilizing multiple languages, our findings can inform the design of RDLs for multilingual replicated data systems.