Patrick Lam

@va2lam@discuss.systems
67 Followers
44 Following
89 Posts
Associate Professor, University of Waterloo
@dongkwan welcome to mastodon! you'll find interesting people on the "live feeds" of this server.

High score, by a not-PL researcher: 8/10
Low score: 4/10
Many people get 6/10.

(The quiz doesn't track anything; it's purely client-side).

I was talking to someone at PLDI and the topic of novelty came up.

Here's a quiz! It randomly picks papers from PLDI 2014 and PLDI 2024. Can you tell which year each paper appeared in?

https://patricklam.ca/pldi-quiz/

Tagging @regehr, who had something to do with the PLDI 2024 program...

PLDI 2014 or 2024?

Personal website of Patrick Lam

Patrick Lam
Oh I see @markusde on stage!
This morning session seems kind of like the "actually compiler optimizations don't help that much" with the "being sane about UBs isn't really that expensive" (Popescu and Lopes) and the current "what does alias analysis really do for perf?" (Weber, Theodoridis, Su) talk.
Who's at #PLDI?

Where to next for static race detection? It is really good at verifying lock based patterns now, but that's not enough for verifying real-world programs, which use all sorts of interesting idioms to avoid races (and hence undefined behaviour!)

On Friday afternoon Karoliine Holter is presenting our TOPLAS paper at #PLDI: "Sound Static Data Race Verification for C: Is the Race Lost?" Joint work with my colleagues from Tartu: Karoliine, Simmo Saan, and Vesal Vojdani.

We identified 20 coding idioms to avoid races by separating accesses in time and space; some existing tool can verify 8 of the 20. If you want to verify real world programs you'd better be able to handle these idioms: we show that they do occur in real programs from the Concrat suite.

PDF: https://patricklam.ca/papers/25.toplas.data-race-empirical.pdf

Hello! Anyone happen to be in Ottawa on Monday? #icse2025
Going through my pictures from SPLASH, I noticed this lawn sign about a ballot initiative. Yes on PL indeed!
Collaborator meetup!