Rachit Nigam

Because I have poor self control, I made a thing to avoid looking at those increasingly terrible ACM Digital Library pages. Introducing Analog Library: https://al.radbox.org

Phew, survived the first grant submission and now onto prepping my first lecture! People weren't joking when they said you can't no-life as a prof. because you'll still have commitments tomorrow 😆

Folks showing up to ASPLOS: would there be interest in having a "junior faculty social"? I used to organize in-person socials for PhD students at PLDI (pltea.github.io) and think it would be fun to have an excuse to meet the cohort of junior faculty!

The SRC is awesome! Especially good for new junior faculty as a way to meet a wide set of soon-to-be-PhD applicants and learn about all the cool research they've been doing!

Curious about some programming languages history: when/where did the idea of "Memory Safety" come from? Is there a good source that traces its development and formalization?

Continuing my long-running beef with "transpiler", I wrote a post trying to formalize different definitions of the word and why they don't work (for me): people.csail.mit.edu/rachit/post/... (Not so secret goal: Get more people to read "On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages")

Q: Is it OK to get the references for my paper from generative AI? A: Only if you verify they are real & relevant. Submitting a paper with hallucinated references would violate the ACM Policy on Authorship, and your paper will likely be desk rejected.

@sigplan-pldi.bsky.social was an absolute blast this year and had a lot of interesting conversations and papers! I've written down a little retrospective reflecting on some of them: people.csail.mit.edu/rachit/post/...

At PLDI this year, I received the SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Distinguished Dissertation award and at ISCA, I received an honorable mention for the SIGARCH / TCCA Outstanding dissertation award! Truly honored to receive recognition from both the communities! Really excited for what comes next!

somehow in $CURRENT_YEAR, I still can't get OCaml's LSP to jump to the correct definition for me after hours of debugging....

PLMW@PLDI'25 is now accepting applications: pldi25.sigplan.org/home/PLMW-pl... Deadline: April 10, 2025 PLMW an excellent place to learn about exciting PL research, from the ground up, and to find your PL friends! Please apply!

implicit public modules baaaaad

SPAA'25 is seeking submissions! Uniquely this year, SPAA seeks a broader set of research areas, including algorithms, systems, PL, applications, quantum, and more. The central theme is parallelism and concurrency. Deadline: Feb 28 Please consider submitting! spaa.acm.org/call-for-pap...

Well-deserved! Iris is also a really great example of how well-engineered artifacts make it dramatically easier to pursue technically deep research.

What are people's favorite "core systems" textbooks (OS, Networking, Databases, etc.)?

using emacs (spacemacs) and enjoying it...i have been corrupted

Switching to OCaml really makes me appreciate how much effort Rust folks put into good error messages

What role should Student Research Competitions play in mentoring new researchers? @notypes.bsky.social and @avh.bsky.social argue for a renewed focus on feedback and visibility for SRCs. blog.sigplan.org/2025/01/13/t...

Mentoring is incredibly important to students and young researchers. @notypes.bsky.social and @avh.bsky.social talk about the "missing mentoring pillar" in our latest PL Perspectives blog post blog.sigplan.org/2025/01/13/t...

Been thinking about these ideas for a couple of years! Finally time to put them into action and make the SRC an awesome place for junior researchers to get high-quality feedback on ongoing work!

The paper on Data Race Freedom a la Mode was just awarded a Distinguished Paper award at POPL25! An excellent excuse to read all about a potential future for safe parallel programming in OCaml. richarde.dev/papers/2025/...

wait does ocaml NOT have global DCE?

☕️ We’re running LATTE again: our ASPLOS workshop about languages/compilers/tools/whatever for hardware design. Submissions are just little 2-pagers, due on January 31. Plenty of time to throw something together! capra.cs.cornell.edu/latte25/

Also a classic example of something architects thought would be good (resolving branches take time so lets do something useful in the middle) but didn't really work because compilers and programmers couldn't use it well!

Okay, I am in NYC for a bit. Where do the cool people (PL / Systems / Architecture) hang out?? I promise food and hot takes.

If you're working in the general area of languages and/or accelerators, you should absolutely submit a paper! I'm biased of course, but LATTE always has a ton of great people and interesting discussion so I hope to see everyone there :) Submissions close on Jan 31 The workshop is on March 30

there is an art in writing a one-page long letter of recommendation for a student and still making it compelling. concise, to the point, and hard to ignore.

SIGPLAN-M and PLTea.github.io continue to fuel my belief that broader, virtual meet-ups are an incredibly important way to grow the research community. Looks like folks at PLDI also agree!!

Before PLDI 2021, in-person PC meetings were the norm. The steering committee decided to reconsider, 4 years hence, whether to revive them. That bill has come due. We have survey results. blog.sigplan.org/2025/01/02/s...

Academic LoRs: "This student is fantastic! Let me spend the next 2 pages describing the nuances of their research experience and places for growth......" Industrial LoRs: "The student performed well under my supervision."

After 6 wonderful years with @samps.phd at Cornell, I have finally defended my PhD, written a 250-page document, and submitted that one NSF survey form Thank you to everyone who was a part of the journey and I am excited for the next chapter!

waiting for synopsys to release the "Design Transpiler" to make money off of people who tell me transpilers are different from compilers

We're running our early workshop on building new languages, tools, and techniques for accelerator design (capra.cs.cornell.edu/latte25/) co-located with ASPLOS! It's an awesome crowd of PL, Compilers, and HW design folks all of whom are passionated about making accelerator design better!

Another recommendation question: any guides/books on reasoning about temporal logics in theorem provers?

Who are the new* PL faculty in US? If you / someone you started in as a PL faculty, can you please point me to them? *last two years and starting next year

PLsky: what are some topics to cover in an "Advanced tools in PL" class? My picks: - Metaprogramming Systems (macros, user-scheduling) - Type systems (Graded modal, dependent, substructural) - Program logics (hoare, incorrectness) What else?

Since enough of PL twitter seems to have moved on here: Hi I'm Raghav; I'm a PhD candidate at Purdue and I'm on the faculty job market this year! My research lies at the intersection of PL and security; specifically, I like making privacy-preserving programs more efficient and...

Lindsey Kuper's* group has produced this fantastic zine on choreographic programming that folks should definitely check out: decomposition.al/blog/2024/12... (* can't seem to find Lindsey here but please tag if you know the handle)

Really enjoyed this post from John (demystifying a Cousot paper)! There is something so satisfying about being able to articulate the relationships between things that seem *just* similar enough.