Have you ever wondered why hardware security isn’t a solved problem? It’s been six years since Spectre and Meltdown sent tech companies scrambling to fix the vulnerabilities that hardware manufacturers created with their own optimizations. Everyone involved–chip manufacturers, big tech, the security community–seems to agree that hardware security bugs are Bad and To Be Avoided. So if everyone believes that these vulnerabilies shouldn’t happen, why do they keep happening?

Testing cannot ensure correctness, but verification can. The problem with a specify-and-verify approach is the first part: the specification. Programmers are often reluctant to write specifications because it seems like extra work, beyond writing the code.

One of the great joys of being a researcher is observing an interesting phenomenon and deciding that you want to understand it and recreate it. Then there’s the additional joy of being a knitting researcher, and having that phenomenon be a cool object you can also display in your house or wear!

Code formatters are tools to make source code in a programming language easy to read. This series of blog posts presents a systematic analysis of code formatters. We aim to answer the following questions: What are the advantages and disadvantages of different kinds of code formatters (for both users and implementers)? How do they work? And what are some open problems in this space?

Verilog is a language of fundamental importance. Yet, despite that fact, it is mostly ignored in the world of programming languages (PL) and compilers research. In this post, I present one very simple fact about Verilog programs: they represent pure expressions. In explaining this, I hope to make Verilog more approachable by a programming languages and compilers audience.

In the last post, we showed the connections between chase and techniques developed in databases literature and tree automata literature, and how these connections help us understand equality saturation (EqSat). In this blog post, we will focus on a specific problem EqSat faces: the termination problem¹, something my collaborators and I have been working on recently.

While “Goto Considered Harmful” (Dijkstra, 1968) is one of the most famous pieces of writing in Computer Science, its enduring relevance to programming languages is almost wholly unappreciated or — at best — misunderstood. Historically, supporters and detractors from the original letter have addressed themselves to the conclusion that use of the goto statement should be avoided. (Including Knuth [1]) Depressingly, it took over two decades [2] before anyone bothered to empirically test Dijkstra’s claim. To the best of my knowledge, no-one ever disputed, supported, or merely considered Dijkstra’s premises and form of argument.

Hello, and welcome to the first edition of the official UW PLSE blog!

Hi! My name is Matt (he/him), one of the new teaching faculty at the Allen School this fall. I’ve been given a warm welcome by the community at UW, including at PLSE – where I’ve already met some wonderful people who do all things software engineering, programming languages, and running!