🏄 Today we released Surfer 0.6.0 🎉 This release contains a bunch of improvements including configurable key bindings, mapping translators, new commands and much more! Oh, and we have a new icon!

Also, some students will work on better annotations in Surfer soon. They asked for opinions here: https://forms.gle/CKqtgemjrNsfE7XY7

You can read the full change-log for the new release over at https://gitlab.com/surfer-project/surfer/-/releases/v0.6.0

Oh, and we have a new logo!

Finally, we have a proper journal paper about Spade 🎉!

It is a pretty complete description of the current state of the language, but I'm honestly more excited about the way we managed to argue for having a new HDL at Spade's abstraction level, roughly RTL but with zero cost abstractions on top

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3793550

For those who missed my #Asahilinux #39c3 talk, it's available at https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-apple-silicon now.

I've also just pushed my slides to https://github.com/svenpeter42/39c3 and uploaded them as PDF to https://cfp.cccv.de/39c3/talk/YGHB9K/

Anyone know if the Young Architect's Workshop (YArch) is being held at ASPLOS '26?

Seems like it's not in the current ASPLOS workshop schedule <https://www.asplos-conference.org/workshops-and-tutorials/>

abstract transfer functions -- code that implements for example a bitshift operation on integer ranges or "known bits" -- are super fun to work on, but I've also long wanted to synthesize these from specifications. this could solve the problem where, for example, LLVM has very few transfer functions for its architecture-specific intrinsics. anyway, here's a paper we did on this topic that's going to appear in POPL early next year:

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/popl26.pdf

A bit late for this, but might as well:

**I am recruiting PhD students this year**

I am looking for students with strengths in some subset of compilers, databases, e-graphs, SMT solvers, theorem proving, and logic programming. You definitely don't have to have mastery of all those things (I don't!), but there's a lot of fun work to do in the intersection.