Holistic View on Alternative Programming languages for Radio Access Network Applications in Cloud and Embedded Deployments

Sammanfattning: With the emergence of cloud based solutions, companies such as Ericsson AB have started investigating different means of modernizing current implementations of software systems. With many new programming languages emerging such as Rust and Go, investigating the suitability of these languages compared to C++ can be seen as a part of this modernization process. There are many important aspects to consider when investigating the suitability of new programming languages, and this thesis makes an attempt at considering most of them. Therefore both performance which is a common metric as well as development efficiency which is a less common metric, were combined to provide a holistic view. Performance was defined as CPU usage, maximum memory usage, processing time per sequence and latency at runtime, which was measured on both x86 and ARM based hardware. Development efficiency was defined as the combination of the productivity metric, the maintainability index metric and the cognitive complexity metric. Combining these two metrics resulted in two general guidelines: if the application is constantly under change and performance is not critical, Go should be the language of choice. If instead performance is critical C++ should be the language of choice. Overall, when choosing a suitable programming language, one needs to weigh development efficiency against performance to make a decision.