There's a conference. It's called SCAM (Source Code Analysis & Manipulation, I'm sure the acronym is a total coincidence). I'm the PC co-chair, working with Carolin Brandt.

Submit your papers! Deadline is June 11th. Conference is in Benevento, Italy, in September.

https://conf.researchr.org/home/scam-2026#Research-Track-Call-for-Papers

SCAM has historically been gotten more attention from the broader Software Engineering research community rather than the Programming Languages community, but we would love to see more PL papers as well.

I was looking at the citation counts for SCAM 2016 papers. They are more than respectable! The top 5 papers have more than 50 citations each.

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...

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