Bristlecone: A Language for Robust Software Systems

We present Bristlecone, a programming language for robust software systems. Bristlecone applications have two components: a high-level organization description that specifies how the application’s conceptual operations interact, and a low-level operational description that specifies the sequence of instructions that comprise an individual conceptual operation. Bristlecone uses the high-level organization description to recover the software system from an error to a consistent state and to reason how to safely continue the software system’s execution after the error.

We have implemented a compiler and runtime for Bristlecone.We have evaluated this implementation on three benchmark applications: a web crawler, a web server, and a multi-room chat server. We developed both a Bristlecone version and a Java version of each benchmark application. We used injected failures to evaluate the robustness of each version of the application. We found that the Bristlecone versions of the benchmark applications more successfully survived the injected failures.