The invention pertains to a method of implementing packet-processing devices on multi-table datapath processors, comprising of a high-level, Turing-complete programming language that permits programmers to express time-invariant or time-variant packet-processing behavior using general-purpose programming languages, suitable compilation and analysis methods to transform a given input program into a datapath design, and a runtime control program to be executed on a general-purpose processor which can communicate with a configurable datapath element and which configures the datapath element according to the compiled datapath design and which implements appropriate dynamic control (e.g. flow table population) for the configured datapath element.