Under consideration for publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming 1 Applying Prolog to Develop Distributed Systems

Development of distributed systems is a difficult task. Declarative programming tech-niques hold a promising potential for effectively supporting programmer in this challenge. While Datalog-based languages have been actively explored for programming distributed systems, Prolog received relatively little attention in this application area so far. In this paper we present a Prolog-based programming system, called DAHL, for the declarative development of distributed systems. DAHL extends Prolog with an event-driven control mechanism and built-in networking procedures. Our experimental evaluation using a dis-tributed hash-table data structure, a protocol for achieving Byzantine fault tolerance, and a distributed software model checker – all implemented in DAHL – indicates the viability of the approach.