If any language takes over the world, I'm happy it's BPF that's doing so.

[Zenaan Harkness]

Teh Linux kernel's BPF is soon to take over the world - Linus once
half joked that the goal of Linux is nothing short of world
domination, but it's taken ~30 years to get here with BPF rapidaly
rising the totem pole:


Comment:
https://lwn.net/Articles/773497/
  LLVM bitcode, in addition to the lack of portability between LLVM
  releases etc, is a hell of a lot further from the machine than
  (e)BPF is. BPF is really quite remarkably easy to JIT down to
  x86_64 and most other modern machine languages, and the interpreter
  core is pretty small and easy to read as well, as such things go:
  most opcodes translate directly into a little bit of obvious C
  acting directly on the variables that hold the register contents.
  (Far more work goes into the verifier, which of course is necessary
  even, perhaps especially, if you're JITting).

  One sign that BPF is nicely designed: as someone who's been
  hand-writing BPF recently (rewriting a code generator that used to
  generate output for a much more, ah, *verbose* intermediate
  representation with many more opcodes), whenever I found I needed a
  particular opcode, it was there, and nothing I didn't need was
  there except the weird historical stuff to do packet content
  inspection.

  I like BPF. I thought I'd hate it, because all such things are
  generally hateful, but it's not hateful at all: it has no horrible
  irregularities that make you scream and most of the annoying limits
  as a general-purpose-but-verified language (stack size, etc, lack
  of even constrained loops, etc) are being raised or fixed as we
  speak. If any language takes over its world like BPF is doing, I'm
  happy it's BPF that's doing so.



Article (I think such LWN articles are paywalled for 7 days only - I
wouldn't be a subscriber otherwise...):

Binary portability for BPF programs
https://lwn.net/Articles/773198/