PLSE Blog

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!

The phase-ordering problem is a long standing problem in program optimization: Consider program \((a\times 2)/2\). A program optimizer may readily optimize the subexpression \(a\times 2\) into \(a\ll 1\) and get \((a\ll 1)/2\), at which stage it cannot optimize the program further. Or it can also realize that the multiplication and division operators can be simply canceled out, yielding \(a\). This indicates that applying one optimization may disable another optimization, but naively exploring all optimization orders can lead to a combinatorial explosion.