Rachit Nigam

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.

Slide from Hot Chips 2025: "2025 TCMM Open Source Hardware Contribution Award: Claire Wolf: In recognition of outstanding contributions to RISC-V — including BitManip, RVFI, and PicoRV32—and to open-source tools like Yosys and IceStorm. [IEEE Computer Society TCMM / Technical Community on Microprocessors and Microcomputers]"

Congratulations @clairexen.bsky.social: #HotChips / IEEE TCMM 2025 Open Source Hardware Contribution Award

@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 2025 - Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop - PLDI 2025 The Programming Language Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) aims to broaden the exposure of late-stage undergraduate students and early-stage graduate students to research and career opportunities in programmi...

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

one of us! one of us!

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.)?

Which specific idea? I can think of quite a few bits of things that react has that come from academia.

see ur/web, state monad, a long line of @shriram.bsky.social's work

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

syntactically or expressivity wise (amount of code needed to express an idea)

And again, as a testing expert you (and similarly other PL people with different verification expertise) might be well suited to do this work.

Regardless, I'm broadly of the opinion that researchers should do what they want and not be pulled by things that don't excite them.

I think the challenge is demonstrating to people that they even *should* use these systems (instead of taking the path of least resistance which is asking thr LLM to generate the tests for you)

- a majority of LLM / Agentic systems work is being done outside the community
- formal reasoning with AI people have been ahead of the curve so that's one place we've been doing well

- Bug data systems (spark, map-reduce were not PL conf papers)
- ML (TVM, PyTorch published at OSDI, ASPLOS)
- Cloud systems (hydro is at VLDB)
- High-performance design (HW design, image processing etc. came from outside the community)

This is an interesting thread because my perspective on your work is that it's precisely the kind of thing we need to make LLM-assisted code generation better *now*.

Some folks in formal methods already realize this but: when code is cheap to generate, verification becomes the primary problem

I would say the benefit of academia is the ability to take long-term bets instead of waiting for things to take their proper course.

PL historically has been late to the party on many different trends; it takes 2-3 years to really get a grasp on the ideas in a new area and contribute back

You can reasonably argue whether a class on C programming (or build systems, tooling, validating programs, etc.) would be useful or not but it is a materially different curricular goal from what a required, sophomore-level systems courses do (and I would argue, should do)

As @shriram.bsky.social always points out, it's more important to look at what the goals of the curriculum is instead of the specific language it uses.

The goals of most these classes is to teach students systems abstractions (which might include C but touch ISA, circuits, OS abstractions) ... 1/2

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

I don't think of "manufacturer prowess" (compilation is not novel-y hard, it is a lot of engineering).

Mobile definitely laid the groundwork

I don't have strong evidence to think so. For example, RISC-V has been in development for quite some time but compiler support is not super strong.

Said differently: this remains a function of consumer demand and compiler engineering remains slow

Can you say a bit more about what you mean by adapting?

Like, creating new compiler backends or something?

This is a terry pratchett sentence right here

as opposed to? it seems most (all?) search techniques are enumerative given a broad definition of enumeration (are wrong programs allowed? partial ones?)

The Missing Mentoring Pillar The Missing Mentoring Pillar The programming languages (PL) community has developed a whole host of mentoring pillars to help new research become a part of our community The Programming Languages M…

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...

The Missing Mentoring Pillar The Missing Mentoring Pillar The programming languages (PL) community has developed a whole host of mentoring pillars to help new research become a part of our community The Programming Languages M…

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...