Skip to content

Commit df24626

Browse files
authored
Merge pull request #351 from ilyasergey/master
Update SIGPLAN Research Highlights for March 2026
2 parents 363ecbd + e5c4c1c commit df24626

File tree

2 files changed

+90
-11
lines changed

2 files changed

+90
-11
lines changed

Highlights.md

Lines changed: 7 additions & 8 deletions
Original file line numberDiff line numberDiff line change
@@ -12,11 +12,10 @@ also recommended for consideration for the
1212

1313
### SIGPLAN Research Highlights Papers
1414

15-
As of February 2025, 70 papers have been recognized by the SIGPLAN
16-
Research Highlights committee, and 34 SIGPLAN papers have been
17-
selected to appear as CACM Research Highlights. This [webpage]({% link
18-
Highlights/Papers.md %}) contains the full list of papers.
19-
15+
As of March 2026, 81 papers have been recognized by the SIGPLAN Research
16+
Highlights committee, and 39 SIGPLAN papers have been selected to appear as CACM
17+
Research Highlights. This [webpage]({% link Highlights/Papers.md %}) contains
18+
the full list of papers.
2019

2120
### Nomination Process
2221

@@ -36,9 +35,9 @@ ASPLOS, and PPoPP, nominated from two sources:
3635
### Call for Nominations for 2025
3736

3837
SIGPLAN members are invited to submit nominations for the papers
39-
published in 2024 via [this
40-
form](https://forms.gle/4xyj1eRZKjkUKC6j6). The deadline for the
41-
nominations is **15 August 2025 AoE**.
38+
published in 2025 via [this
39+
form](https://forms.gle/QTbqWUbPr3GpTGuc9). The deadline for the
40+
nominations is **15 June 2026 AoE**.
4241

4342
### SIGPLAN Research Highlights Committee
4443

_data/HighlightsPapers.yaml

Lines changed: 83 additions & 3 deletions
Original file line numberDiff line numberDiff line change
@@ -1,3 +1,66 @@
1+
Selected March 2026:
2+
3+
- Title: "_[Multiverse Notebook: Shifting Data Scientists to Time Travelers](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649838)_"
4+
Authors: "Shigeyuki Sato (The University of Electro-Communications), Tomoki Nakamaru (The University of Tokyo)"
5+
Venue: OOPSLA 2024
6+
NominationStatement: |
7+
Computational notebooks like Jupyter are the de facto standard for data
8+
science programming, yet they are notorious for hidden state and
9+
irreproducible results. This paper identifies the root cause: data
10+
scientists routinely backtrack to earlier points in a notebook and patch
11+
their code, but doing so without re-executing everything is unsafe: an
12+
empirical study on Kaggle shows that around 11% of such revisions silently
13+
produce wrong results. The paper then introduces Multiverse Notebook, a
14+
notebook engine that lets users safely time-travel to any past cell state
15+
and branch off with new code, using POSIX fork for cell-wise checkpointing
16+
and an aggressive tenuring strategy that makes CPython's garbage collector
17+
copy-on-write-friendly. Evaluated on ten real-world Kaggle explorations, the
18+
approach matches or beats manual selective re-execution in wall-clock time
19+
while guaranteeing consistency. The work described in this paper is a nice
20+
example of applying systems and PL techniques, such as dynamic patching,
21+
checkpointing, and memory management, to a tool that millions of people use
22+
daily.
23+
24+
- Title: "_[Snapshottable Stores](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3674637)_"
25+
Authors: "Clément Allain (Inria), Basile Clément (OCamlPro), Alexandre Moine (Inria), Gabriel Scherer (Université Paris Cité, Inria, CNRS, IRIF)"
26+
Venue: ICFP 2024
27+
NominationStatement: |
28+
Backtracking is a common technique in type checkers, theorem provers, and
29+
constraint solvers, yet adding it to an existing imperative data structure
30+
typically means either a full copy on each snapshot (expensive when
31+
snapshots are frequent) or switching to persistent maps (a logarithmic
32+
overhead on every access, paid even when no backtracking occurs). This paper
33+
presents a snapshottable store---a bag of mutable references whose state can
34+
be efficiently captured and restored---that avoids both pitfalls. The key
35+
idea, extending a 1978 technique by Baker, is a journaled version tree where
36+
the current state lives in ordinary references and past states are recovered
37+
by replaying a log. A "record elision" optimisation ensures that reads and
38+
writes cost essentially the same as plain references when snapshots are
39+
infrequent, making the library a safe default even when backtracking is
40+
rare. The implementation is short, subtle, and mechanically verified in Rocq
41+
using Iris. The paper takes a simple, useful idea, works out the engineering
42+
and correctness details thoroughly, and presents the result with clarity and
43+
good taste.
44+
45+
46+
- Title: "_[Implementation and Synthesis of Math Library Functions](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632874)_"
47+
Authors: "Ian Briggs (University Of Utah), Yash Lad (University Of Utah), Pavel Panchekha (University Of Utah)"
48+
Venue: POPL 2024
49+
NominationStatement: |
50+
Math library functions like `exp`, `sin`, and `log` are critical
51+
infrastructure, yet implementing them well requires rare expertise. This
52+
paper introduces MegaLibm, a domain-specific language whose type system
53+
catches mathematical mistakes at compile time, whose compositional design
54+
allows complex algorithms to be built from simple, verifiable pieces, and
55+
whose tuning parameters separate high-level design from low-level precision
56+
choices. Its type-directed synthesis algorithm using e-graphs can generate
57+
complete implementations from scratch. MegaLibm replicates 8
58+
state-of-the-art implementations in far less code, produces improved
59+
variations, and even uncovers a bug in VDT's cosine. The paper is a nice
60+
example of applying Programming Lanugage ideas, such as typing,
61+
compositionality, and synthesis, opening up a domain that has long been
62+
inaccessible to non-specialists.
63+
164
Selected February 2025:
265

366
- Title: "_[A Grounded Conceptual Model for Ownership Types in Rust](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622841)_"
@@ -17,7 +80,7 @@ Selected February 2025:
1780
Overall, the paper follows scientific principles and introduces
1881
the PL community to an original and effective way to study a
1982
language usability problem.
20-
83+
CACMSelection: true
2184

2285
- Title: "_[Dynamic Race Detection with O(1) Samples](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571238)_"
2386
Authors: "Mosaad Al Thokair (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Minjian Zhang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Umang Mathur (National University of Singapore), Mahesh Viswanathan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)"
@@ -43,6 +106,7 @@ Selected February 2025:
43106
The use of sampling to improve the performance of a data race
44107
detector has been previously explored, but this work extends and
45108
analyzes that idea.
109+
CACMSelection: true
46110

47111
- Title: "_[Catala: a Programming Language for the Law](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3473582)_"
48112
Authors: "Denis Merigoux (INRIA), Nicolas Chataing (ENS Paris), Jonathan Protzenko (Microsoft Research)"
@@ -71,6 +135,7 @@ Selected February 2025:
71135
paper is extremely well written and accessible. Egg has already
72136
been quite influential, which numerous follow-on papers,
73137
industrial adoption, an annual workshop, and a growing community.
138+
CACMSelection: true
74139

75140
Selected September 2021:
76141

@@ -88,7 +153,15 @@ Selected September 2021:
88153
reuse properly for the first time. As a result we can enjoy elegance, and
89154
state-of-the-art performance, both at the same time. Sometimes we can have
90155
our cake and eat it too.
91-
CACMSelection: true
156+
CACMHighlight:
157+
Date: March 2023
158+
Title: "Achieving High Performance the Functional Way: Expressing High-Performance Optimizations as Rewrite Strategies"
159+
Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3580371
160+
TechnicalPerspective:
161+
Title: 'Reconsidering the Design of User-Schedulable Languages'
162+
Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3580370
163+
Author: Jonathan Ragan-Kelley
164+
92165

93166
- Title: "_[Learning-based Memory Allocation for C++ Server Workloads](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3373376.3378525)_"
94167
Authors: "Martin Maas (Google), David Andersen (CMU), Michael Isard (Google), Mohammad Mahdi (Facebook), Kathryn S McKinley (Google), Colin Raffel (University of North Carolina)"
@@ -149,7 +222,14 @@ Selected September 2021:
149222
interest, which demonstrates for the first time that one can obtain
150223
deterministic certificates on properties of the training phase of
151224
realistic machine learning models.
152-
CACMSelection: true
225+
CACMHighlight:
226+
Date: January 2023
227+
Title: "Proving Data-Poisoning Robustness in Decision Trees"
228+
Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3576894
229+
TechnicalPerspective:
230+
Title: 'Beautiful Symbolic Abstractions for Safe and Secure Machine Learning'
231+
Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576893
232+
Author: Martin Vechev
153233

154234
Selected July 2020:
155235

0 commit comments

Comments
 (0)