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Ian McCormack

@icmccorm.com
52 followers 73 following 37 posts

PhD Candidate in Software Engineering @CMU Studying Rust interop 🦀 borrowsanitizer.com

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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 18/09/2026
There’s something about the ending of Portal 2 that has stuck with me forever and feels totally different from anything else I’ve played. The game is saying goodbye to the player character in-world and to the player simultaneously.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 16/09/2026
Ranch dressing has always been my least favorite food, which makes things even worse because of how many good pizza places there are in Pittsburgh that ~also~ have homemade ranch. Feels like I’m missing out tbh.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 08/09/2026
Heading to Montreal for @rustconf.com this week! On Thursday, I’m giving a talk about BorrowSanitizer: our new dynamic analysis tool for finding undefined behavior in Rust libraries that interoperate with C++. If you’re there too, then let’s chat about interop!
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The Rust Foundation @rustfoundation.org · 04/09/2026
New from the Rust/C++ Interop Initiative: a tool support matrix comparing Crubit, cxx, and Zngur across 25+ interop use cases, an overloading experiment you can try, and more! Read Teor's update here: rustfoundation.org/media/rust-c...
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 02/09/2026
Last week I went back to MN to visit family and go the state fair. After all this time, I still think that the Twin Cities is my favorite place. It’s changed so much over the years, but it still has the same heart.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 19/08/2026
I have seen more Waymo (Waymos?) in Pittsburgh in the past week than I have ever seen anywhere. 🚙
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RustNL @rustnl.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
'Interop is the New Rewrite: Design Axioms for Rust's Next Frontier' by Tyler Mandry at RustWeek 2026! www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NnC... @tmandry.dev #rustlang #RustWeek
youtube.com
Interop is the New Rewrite: Design Axioms for Rust's Next Frontier (Tyler Mandry at RustWeek)
Interop is the New Rewrite: Design Axioms for Rust's Next Frontier by Tyler Mandry. Demand for Rust has grown rapidly, making it a standard choice for new projects that need reliable and efficient…
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 05/08/2026
Any good recs for BBQ near Pittsburgh? I feel like there aren’t as many places as there are in Minneapolis, where I grew up. We had Famous Dave’s / Old Southern everywhere.
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The Rust Foundation @rustfoundation.org · 15/07/2026
crates.io must make it easy to audit and trust the dependencies millions of Rust developers rely on. In the team's latest development update, Rust Foundation Software Engineer @tobias.bieniek.cloud (on behalf of the crates.io team) covers 6 months of changes: blog.rust-lang.org/2026/07/13/c...
blog.rust-lang.org
crates.io: development update | Rust Blog
Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
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nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · 04/05/2026
Ooh this is gonna be interesting
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RustConf @rustconf.com · 04/05/2026
🔦 #rustconf 2026 Speaker Spotlight: "BorrowSanitizer: Securing Rust Across Foreign Function Boundaries" presented by Ian McCormack (PhD Candidate, Carnegie Mellon University) ➡️ Find this session on our schedule: sched.co/2KHtb 🎟️ Book your spot today! bit.ly/4tLbAkd
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RustConf @rustconf.com · 09/04/2026
🦀 BIG NEWS, Rustaceans! Tickets are on sale and our speakers & schedule are live for #rustconf 2026! 📅 September 8–11 | Montreal + Online A thread on what to expect... rustconf.com/register?utm...
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RustConf @rustconf.com · 27/03/2026
Thinking about joining us IRL in Montreal for #rustconf26? Here are some resources to help you prep: 🏨 Visa + travel info(+discount codes!) → rustconf.com/venue-travel/ 💼 Convince Your Boss template → rustconf.com/convince-your-boss/ Tickets and schedule available soon! #rustconf
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 12/03/2026
Whatever happened to local drugstores? Rite-Aid went out of business and now there’s nowhere to go in Pittsburgh.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 29/01/2026
I’m torn on short form content lately. One one hand, I can see how just disassociating and watching reels is unhealthy, but there are some topics, like recipes, that do really well in that space, and that give me great ideas that I can work with. I think I just miss Vine.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 19/01/2026
For some reason, every pair of Converse I’ve ever had has fallen apart within 6 months, but I can’t tell if that’s just me or the quality of the shoe.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 18/01/2026
Every year I think I can handle the start-of-semester Trader Joes rush and every year I’m wrong.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 15/01/2026
I see a lot of great ideas from academia for contributions to open source projects, but it feels like they stop short of being adopted in production, either due to out-of-date prototype versions or the inherent friction of getting something ready for a PR. Or maybe something else.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 25/12/2025
I’ve always felt that fantasy novel adaptations would be better as animated series than live action. Like a Stormlight Archive show in the style of the Mighty Nein, instead of something like GoT.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 17/12/2025
Ask not for whom the bells jingle
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 11/12/2025
The worst part about living in an apartment is that there’s no place to kindle a fire and cook something in a dutch oven.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 09/12/2025
I have a really cool winter cap—it’s sort of going to my head.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 08/12/2025
I remember growing up, visiting the La Brea Tar Pits, and wanting to be a paleontologist so I could find fossils. Now, all I find are bugs—and not the prehistoric kind 🥲
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 04/12/2025
I wish people still wrote letters to each other.
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Jonathan Aldrich @jonathanaldrich.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
I'm doing a live Reddit AMA today at 2pm ET! Come ask me about PL, SE, the Master of Software Engineering program I run, Open Access at ACM, my music education startup Noteful, or my silly YouTube video outfits! www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comme...
Me wearing my YouTube Professor outfit: bow tie, jacket, and purple shirt (my favorite color) in front of a gate and a wisteria tree.  The original photo was edited with AI to insert a sign saying "Jonathan Aldrich, Director of the Master of Software Engineering Program at CMU, 11/25/2025."
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 20/11/2025
I’m convinced that the world would be marginally better if everyone could play on a weekly trivia team.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 18/11/2025
There’s nothing in the world quite like a coffee shop with free refills. ☕️
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 15/11/2025
Watching Game of Thrones is making me wish for that Mistborn adaptation Brandon Sanderson keeps talking about…
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 14/11/2025
I can’t tell if it’s wonderful or terrible to figure out the reason for your segfault right as the day is ending.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 13/11/2025
My dryer is evil. It tore apart one sock, and its threads caught up on several other socks, creating a terrible vortex of torn socks. It’s clearly out to get me.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 06/11/2025
Coming from Minnesota, it’s only just starting to feel like fall in Pittsburgh, but the leaves are already mostly gone! 😓 🍂 Wishing for colder weather…
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 26/10/2025
Just arrived in San Jose for this year’s LLVM Developers Meeting! Tomorrow, I’ll be presenting our ongoing work on BorrowSanitizer—an LLVM instrumentation tool for finding Rust-specific forms of undefined behavior in multilanguage applications.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 16/10/2025
Most of the people I know who play pickleball these days are surprised that I used to play it in gym class during high school—was that just a midwest/MN thing? I dunno.
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Jonathan Aldrich @jonathanaldrich.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
#GradualVerification helps developers specify code one component at a time, checking statically where possible and dynamically where necessary. Come see doubleheader talks on #GradualVerification in #IWACO at #SPLASH 2025 / @icfp-conference.bsky.social! 16:25-17:15 in Peony room 4412.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 09/10/2025
Working in C++ lately has me missing Rust’s traits and enums.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 02/10/2025
Digging into backtraces this week—it’s surprising to me how varied and complicated it can be to produce something that I typically take for granted. Especially in a no_std library.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 25/09/2025
For BorrowSanitizer, we have a no_std requirement, but often times I’ve found that the only crates for solving certain problems rely on std, and that no_std solutions are less maintained. It makes me wonder if tooling would help identify areas where std is unnecessary.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 04/09/2025
Rust has been a better experience than C++ for me when using unfamiliar APIs. In a large C++ codebase, there are a bunch of unspoken idioms about how to use certain functions correctly that are not always documented. With Rust, these are enforced by the type system.
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 07/08/2025
Lately I’ve been building a tool that requires changed to the Rust compiler’s LLVM backend, which you cannot do through an external plugin. This is good for correctness—ideally, you don’t want to allow third-party plugins to break codegen—but makes it tricky for tools that need that level of access.
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Jonathan Aldrich @jonathanaldrich.bsky.social · 02/05/2025
11am today at #ICSE2025: Rust provides memory safety to low-level code, but in practice Rust libraries link to unsafe C. @icmccorm.com Josh Sunshine and I used dynamic analysis to find 46 cases where the C code broke Rust's memory rules, causing undefined behavior. Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2404.11671
arxiv.org
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Ian McCormack @icmccorm.com · 28/04/2025
I’m in Ottawa this week for #icse2025! Always down to chat about #rustlang 🦀
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Steve Klabnik @steveklabnik.com · 07/04/2025
A Study of Undefined Behavior Across Foreign Function Boundaries in #rustlang Libraries arxiv.org/abs/2404.11671
arxiv.org
A Study of Undefined Behavior Across Foreign Function Boundaries in Rust Libraries
Developers rely on the static safety guarantees of the Rust programming language to write secure and performant applications. However, Rust is frequently used to interoperate with other languages whic...
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