[j-nsp] MX104 capabilities question

[Phil Mayers]

On 09/06/16 14:39, Saku Ytti wrote:

> They do something quite different than JNPR or CSCO. I think
> programming language is important, and I think C is terrible language,

It is a terrible, terrible language. Their should be a C driving 
license, and unless you're writing kernel code, you shouldn't be allowed 
to use it.

> because it's very hard to write quality code on.
> Arista isn't really using C, mostly C++ and good portion of that is
> machine generated from their own proprietary state description
> language. They also heavily unit test and automate black-box testing.

Ooh, that's interesting. They've actually adopted some modern software 
practices. How novel!

> I wish someone would do something even more novel, like create full
> routing suite in Erlang. But from what we have now in the market, I
> think Arista is most innovative.

Yeah it'd be great to move away from this low-level paradigm for NOS 
code to a language and runtime with better features. I guess all the 
IOS/JunOS devs starts to see the problem in terms of their existing 
solution set, when all you have is a hammer etc.

It's a shame the whitebox switching platforms don't have better control 
plane (as well as better hardware programming APIs, or at least some 
open docs). It would be interesting to experiment with some of these ideas.