iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Rachit Nigam

Adrian Sampson @adrian.discuss.systems.ap.brid.gy · 10/03/2026

Because I have poor self control, I made a thing to avoid looking at those increasingly terrible ACM Digital Library pages. Introducing Analog Library: al.radbox.org

al.radbox.org

Analog Library Premium Edition™

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Phew, survived the first grant submission and now onto prepping my first lecture! People weren't joking when they said you can't no-life as a prof. because you'll still have commitments tomorrow 😆

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

People keep asking me what the "Rust for hardware design" would look like. Those who know their PL history know that, before we could build Rust, we had to define ideas like "Memory Safety".

people.csail.mit.edu

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

Hardware design should be SAFER! Memory-safe software languages changed the world and allowed to us to build massively larger systems. At their heart, memory-safe languages eliminate a category of bugs that pointer-manipulating programs suffer from.

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Folks showing up to ASPLOS: would there be interest in having a "junior faculty social"? I used to organize in-person socials for PhD students at PLDI (pltea.github.io) and think it would be fun to have an excuse to meet the cohort of junior faculty!

pltea.github.io

PLTea

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

The SRC is awesome! Especially good for new junior faculty as a way to meet a wide set of soon-to-be-PhD applicants and learn about all the cool research they've been doing!

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Curious about some programming languages history: when/where did the idea of "Memory Safety" come from? Is there a good source that traces its development and formalization?

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Continuing my long-running beef with "transpiler", I wrote a post trying to formalize different definitions of the word and why they don't work (for me): people.csail.mit.edu/rachit/post/... (Not so secret goal: Get more people to read "On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages")

people.csail.mit.edu

Formally speaking, "Transpiler" is a useless word | Rachit Nigam

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Reposted by Rachit Nigam

Jonathan Aldrich @jonathanaldrich.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Q: Is it OK to get the references for my paper from generative AI? A: Only if you verify they are real & relevant. Submitting a paper with hallucinated references would violate the ACM Policy on Authorship, and your paper will likely be desk rejected.

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Reposted by Rachit Nigam

Jan Gray @jangray.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

Congratulations @clairexen.bsky.social: #HotChips / IEEE TCMM 2025 Open Source Hardware Contribution Award

Slide from Hot Chips 2025:
"2025 TCMM Open Source Hardware Contribution Award:
Claire Wolf: In recognition of outstanding contributions to RISC-V —
including BitManip, RVFI, and PicoRV32—and to open-source tools like Yosys and IceStorm. [IEEE Computer Society TCMM / Technical Community on Microprocessors and Microcomputers]"

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

@sigplan-pldi.bsky.social was an absolute blast this year and had a lot of interesting conversations and papers! I've written down a little retrospective reflecting on some of them: people.csail.mit.edu/rachit/post/...

people.csail.mit.edu

Reflecting on PLDI 2025 | Rachit Nigam

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

At PLDI this year, I received the SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Distinguished Dissertation award and at ISCA, I received an honorable mention for the SIGARCH / TCCA Outstanding dissertation award! Truly honored to receive recognition from both the communities! Really excited for what comes next!

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

somehow in $CURRENT_YEAR, I still can't get OCaml's LSP to jump to the correct definition for me after hours of debugging....

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Reposted by Rachit Nigam

Jingbo Wang @jingbow.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

PLMW@PLDI'25 is now accepting applications: pldi25.sigplan.org/home/PLMW-pl... Deadline: April 10, 2025 PLMW an excellent place to learn about exciting PL research, from the ground up, and to find your PL friends! Please apply!

pldi25.sigplan.org

PLMW @ PLDI 2025 - Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop - PLDI 2025

The Programming Language Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) aims to broaden the exposure of late-stage undergraduate students and early-stage graduate students to research and career opportunities in programmi...

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

implicit public modules baaaaad

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Reposted by Rachit Nigam

Sam Westrick @shwestrick.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

SPAA'25 is seeking submissions! Uniquely this year, SPAA seeks a broader set of research areas, including algorithms, systems, PL, applications, quantum, and more. The central theme is parallelism and concurrency. Deadline: Feb 28 Please consider submitting! spaa.acm.org/call-for-pap...

spaa.acm.org

Call For Papers – ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Well-deserved! Iris is also a really great example of how well-engineered artifacts make it dramatically easier to pursue technically deep research.

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

What are people's favorite "core systems" textbooks (OS, Networking, Databases, etc.)?

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

using emacs (spacemacs) and enjoying it...i have been corrupted

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

Switching to OCaml really makes me appreciate how much effort Rust folks put into good error messages

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Been thinking about these ideas for a couple of years! Finally time to put them into action and make the SRC an awesome place for junior researchers to get high-quality feedback on ongoing work!

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Reposted by Rachit Nigam

Yaron Minsky @yminsky.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

The paper on Data Race Freedom a la Mode was just awarded a Distinguished Paper award at POPL25! An excellent excuse to read all about a potential future for safe parallel programming in OCaml. richarde.dev/papers/2025/...

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

wait does ocaml NOT have global DCE?

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Reposted by Rachit Nigam

Adrian Sampson @samps.phd · 09/01/2025

☕️ We’re running LATTE again: our ASPLOS workshop about languages/compilers/tools/whatever for hardware design. Submissions are just little 2-pagers, due on January 31. Plenty of time to throw something together! capra.cs.cornell.edu/latte25/

capra.cs.cornell.edu

LATTE ’25

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Also a classic example of something architects thought would be good (resolving branches take time so lets do something useful in the middle) but didn't really work because compilers and programmers couldn't use it well!

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

Okay, I am in NYC for a bit. Where do the cool people (PL / Systems / Architecture) hang out?? I promise food and hot takes.

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Reposted by Rachit Nigam

TheZoq2 @thezoq2.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

If you're working in the general area of languages and/or accelerators, you should absolutely submit a paper! I'm biased of course, but LATTE always has a ton of great people and interesting discussion so I hope to see everyone there :) Submissions close on Jan 31 The workshop is on March 30

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

there is an art in writing a one-page long letter of recommendation for a student and still making it compelling. concise, to the point, and hard to ignore.

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

SIGPLAN-M and PLTea.github.io continue to fuel my belief that broader, virtual meet-ups are an incredibly important way to grow the research community. Looks like folks at PLDI also agree!!

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Reposted by Rachit Nigam

SIGPLAN @sigplan.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

Before PLDI 2021, in-person PC meetings were the norm. The steering committee decided to reconsider, 4 years hence, whether to revive them. That bill has come due. We have survey results. blog.sigplan.org/2025/01/02/s...

blog.sigplan.org

“Should PLDI return to in-person Program Committee meetings?” – Survey results

[Note: Since PLDI joined the PACM-PL journal, what was previously called Program Committee is now called Review Committee. In the following, we use the term Program Committee (PC) because it is a b…

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Academic LoRs: "This student is fantastic! Let me spend the next 2 pages describing the nuances of their research experience and places for growth......" Industrial LoRs: "The student performed well under my supervision."

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

After 6 wonderful years with @samps.phd at Cornell, I have finally defended my PhD, written a 250-page document, and submitted that one NSF survey form Thank you to everyone who was a part of the journey and I am excited for the next chapter!

Rachit standing in front of a screen that says "Explicit reasoning about time enables the design of modular and efficient abstractions for hardware design."

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

waiting for synopsys to release the "Design Transpiler" to make money off of people who tell me transpilers are different from compilers

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

We're running our early workshop on building new languages, tools, and techniques for accelerator design (capra.cs.cornell.edu/latte25/) co-located with ASPLOS! It's an awesome crowd of PL, Compilers, and HW design folks all of whom are passionated about making accelerator design better!

capra.cs.cornell.edu

LATTE ’25

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Another recommendation question: any guides/books on reasoning about temporal logics in theorem provers?

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

PL/FM people: any recommendations for books on temporal logics? Looking for two kinds: - Overview of various logics (linear, tree, finite, stream, etc.) - In-depth details about the mathematical models used to reason about them

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Who are the new* PL faculty in US? If you / someone you started in as a PL faculty, can you please point me to them? *last two years and starting next year

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

PLsky: what are some topics to cover in an "Advanced tools in PL" class? My picks: - Metaprogramming Systems (macros, user-scheduling) - Type systems (Graded modal, dependent, substructural) - Program logics (hoare, incorrectness) What else?

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Raghav Malik @r4ghav.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Since enough of PL twitter seems to have moved on here: Hi I'm Raghav; I'm a PhD candidate at Purdue and I'm on the faculty job market this year! My research lies at the intersection of PL and security; specifically, I like making privacy-preserving programs more efficient and...

raghav198.github.io

Raghav Malik

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Lindsey Kuper's* group has produced this fantastic zine on choreographic programming that folks should definitely check out: decomposition.al/blog/2024/12... (* can't seem to find Lindsey here but please tag if you know the handle)

decomposition.al

“Communicating Chorrectly with a Choreography” is out!

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Really enjoyed this post from John (demystifying a Cousot paper)! There is something so satisfying about being able to articulate the relationships between things that seem *just* similar enough.

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

If you (or someone you know) is a PhD student in PL and planning to come to PLDI this year, please reach out! I'm looking for a Social Chair who'll help organize event during the conference. Apart from being tremendous fun, the position is extremely visible and useful for late stage students

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

MIT's EECS grad application deadline is today! If you're excited about applying PL & Compilers ideas to high-performance hardware design, apply to work with me! flame.csail.mit.edu/lab/prospect...

flame.csail.mit.edu

Prospective Students | FLAME Lab @ MIT

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

apparently my post "you have built a compiler" (rachit.pl/post/you-hav...) has spawned a little genre: - DBs: dx.tips/oops-database - K8: www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/yo... - Erlang: vereis.com/posts/you_bu... those who fail to learn about systems are doomed to recreate (crappy versions of) them

rachit.pl

Dear Sir, You Have Built a Compiler | Rachit Nigam

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Jonathan has a precise definition so the answer is consistent BUT most people would call Emscripten a compiler and ghcjs a transpiler. I think both are compilers since ES requires complex logic to encode C++ pointers into JS and ghcjs requires similar transforms (presumably) to support laziness

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

my specific bugbear about technical papers using the word "transpiler" is that it tries to mask the complexity of the problem ("oh, it's just a source-to-source translation. nothing to look here.") to avoid comparisons with other work that accepts the nuance and complexity

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Reposted by Rachit Nigam

Konstantinos Kallas @konstantinoskallas.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Attention🚨 We are looking for motivated students and researchers to be members of the PLDI 2025 Artifact Evaluation Committee. This year, we are accepting self-nominations (the form is here: forms.gle/2TPmixasDmqM...). Deadline: Dec 23rd, 2024. For more info: pldi25.sigplan.org/track/pldi-2...

forms.gle

PLDI 2025 Artifact Evaluation Committee Self Nomination

This form allows any member of the community to nominate *yourself* to be part of the Artifact Evaluation Committee for PLDI 2025. While we cannot select all qualified candidates, we will do our best ...

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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

after seeing yet another paper call something a "transpiler", i am once again requesting (telling) people to stop making up words that don't mean anything: rachit.pl/post/transpi... be better than a JavaScript tech bro

rachit.pl

Transpiler, a meaningless word | Rachit Nigam

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