Software sandboxing or software-based fault isolation (SFI) is a lightweight approach to building secure systems out of untrusted components. The idea of SFI is old. Its use in production, to sandbox third-party libraries in Firefox, is new. We describe the PL techniques—notably static information flow control—that were key to deploying SFI in practice and their use in tackling software security more generally.
Sensitivity properties study how the output of a program changes when we make small changes to its input. How can we reason about sensitivity of programs that have probabilistic behavior?
A brief farewell from Mike Hicks, outgoing co-editor at PL Perspectives, and a brief hello by Adrian Sampson, co-editor incoming!
How can types and formal reasoning tools improve the lives of people who write software? This is the focus of the HATRA (Human Aspects of Types and Reasoning Assistants) workshop. At the 2020 meeting, we discussed exciting opportunities for these key PL techniques to make developers more effective.
When developing massively distributed, interactive applications, programmers must select mechanisms that balance consistency, performance, and availability, which can be challenging. New research is looking at ways to automate this selection, with provable guarantees.
The SIGPLAN survey in early 2021 revealed that we want to go to physical conferences again and that we must take inclusion to the next level.
Learn how techniques from traditional compiler verification can be applied to the emerging domain of quantum computing.
Did you think test case reduction was all about debugging? Find out how test case reducers can be used for program optimisation, to generate high coverage tests, for program understanding, and even for fuzzing!
Modern analog computers offer unique programming challenges which make them challenging compilation targets. How do we automatically program an analog computer to implement a computation?
The Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) is directed at new members of the PL community: senior undergraduate and beginning graduate students. With its first edition taking place in January 2012, PLMW is coming up on its ten year anniversary. We take a look back at how PLMW has grown and evolved, and imagine where it could go next.
