OOPSLASPLASH 2019

PACMPL Issue OOPSLA 2019 seeks contributions on all aspects of programming languages and software engineering. Authors of papers published in PACMPL Issue OOPSLA 2019 will present their work at OOPSLA in Athens.

Papers may target any stage of software development, including requirements, modeling, prototyping, design, implementation, generation, analysis, verification, testing, evaluation, maintenance, and reuse of software systems. Contributions may include the development of new tools (such as language front-ends, program analyses, and runtime systems), new techniques (such as methodologies, design processes, and code organization approaches), new principles (such as formalisms, proofs, models, and paradigms), and new evaluations (such as experiments, corpora analyses, user studies, and surveys).

Accepted Papers

	Title
	A Fault-Tolerant Programming Model for Distributed Interactive Applications OOPSLA Ragnar Mogk, Joscha Drechsler, Guido Salvaneschi, Mira Mezini DOI
	A Formalization of Java’s Concurrent Access Modes OOPSLA John Bender, Jens Palsberg DOI
	AL: Autogenerating Supervised Learning Programs OOPSLA José Pablo Cambronero, Martin C. Rinard DOI
	A Path to DOT: Formalizing Fully Path-Dependent Types OOPSLA Marianna Rapoport, Ondřej Lhoták DOI Pre-print Media Attached
	ApproxHPVM: A Portable Compiler IR for Accuracy-Aware Optimizations OOPSLA Hashim Sharif, Prakalp Srivastava, Muhammad Huzaifa, Maria Kotsifakou, Keyur Joshi, Yasmin Sarita, Nathan Zhao, Vikram S. Adve, Sasa Misailovic, Sarita Adve DOI
	Aroma: Code Recommendation via Structural Code Search OOPSLA Sifei Luan, Di Yang, Celeste Barnaby, Koushik Sen, Satish Chandra DOI
	Asphalion: Trustworthy Shielding against Byzantine Faults OOPSLA Ivana Vukotic, Vincent Rahli, Paulo Esteves-Veríssimo DOI
	Automatic and Scalable Detection of Logical Errors in Functional Programming Assignments OOPSLA Dowon Song, Myungho Lee, Hakjoo Oh DOI
	Automatic Repair of Regular Expressions OOPSLA Rong Pan, Qinheping Hu, Gaowei Xu, Loris D'Antoni DOI Pre-print
	AutoPandas: Neural-Backed Generators for Program Synthesis OOPSLA Rohan Bavishi, Caroline Lemieux, Roy Fox, Koushik Sen, Ion Stoica DOI
	BDA: Practical Dependence Analysis for Binary Executables by Unbiased Whole-Program Path Sampling and Per-Path Abstract Interpretation OOPSLA Zhuo Zhang, Wei You, Guanhong Tao, Guannan Wei, Yonghwi Kwon, Xiangyu Zhang DOI Pre-print
	Casting about in the Dark: An Empirical Study of Cast Operations in Java Programs OOPSLA Luis Mastrangelo, Matthias Hauswirth, Nate Nystrom DOI
	Certifying Graph-Manipulating C Programs via Localizations within Data Structures OOPSLA Shengyi Wang, Qinxiang Cao, Anshuman Mohan, Aquinas Hobor DOI Pre-print
	CLOTHO: Directed Test Generation for Weakly Consistent Database Systems OOPSLA Kia Rahmani, Kartik Nagar, Benjamin Delaware, Suresh Jagannathan DOI Pre-print
	Compiler Fuzzing: How Much Does It Matter? OOPSLA Michaël Marcozzi, Qiyi Tang, Alastair F. Donaldson, Cristian Cadar Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached File Attached
	Complete Monitors for Gradual Types OOPSLA Ben Greenman, Matthias Felleisen, Christos Dimoulas DOI
	Coverage Guided, Property Based Testing OOPSLA Leonidas Lampropoulos, Michael Hicks, Benjamin C. Pierce DOI
	DeepSEA: A Language for Certified System Software OOPSLA Vilhelm Sjöberg, Yuyang Sang, Shu-chun Weng, Zhong Shao DOI Pre-print
	Dependence-Aware, Unbounded Sound Predictive Race Detection OOPSLA Kaan Genç, Jake Roemer, Yufan Xu, Michael D. Bond DOI Pre-print
	Derivative Grammars: A Symbolic Approach to Parsing with Derivatives OOPSLA Ian Henriksen, Gianfranco Bilardi, Keshav Pingali DOI
	Design, Implementation, and Application of GPU-Based Java Bytecode Interpreters OOPSLA Ahmet Celik, Pengyu Nie, Chris Rossbach, Milos Gligoric DOI
	Detecting Nondeterministic Payment Bugs in Ethereum Smart Contracts OOPSLA Shuai Wang, Chengyu Zhang, Zhendong Su DOI
	DProf: Distributed Profiler with Strong Guarantees OOPSLA Zachary Benavides, Keval Vora, Rajiv Gupta DOI
	Duet: An Expressive Higher-Order Language and Linear Type System for Statically Enforcing Differential Privacy OOPSLA Joseph P. Near, David Darais, Chike Abuah, Tim Stevens, Pranav Gaddamadugu, Lun Wang, Neel Somani, Mu Zhang, Nikhil Sharma, Alex Shan, Dawn Song DOI
	Effective Lock Handling in Stateless Model Checking OOPSLA Michalis Kokologiannakis, Azalea Raad, Viktor Vafeiadis DOI
	Efficient Lock-Free Durable Sets OOPSLA Yoav Zuriel, Michal Friedman, Gali Sheffi, Nachshon Cohen, Erez Petrank DOI
	Formal Foundations of Serverless Computing OOPSLA Abhinav Jangda, Donald Pinckney, Yuriy Brun, Arjun Guha Link to publication DOI Pre-print
	FuzzFactory: Domain-Specific Fuzzing with Waypoints OOPSLA Rohan Padhye, Caroline Lemieux, Koushik Sen, Laurent Simon, Hayawardh Vijayakumar DOI Pre-print
	Generating a Fluent API with Syntax Checking from an LR Grammar OOPSLA Tetsuro Yamazaki, Tomoki Nakamaru, Kazuhiro Ichikawa, Shigeru Chiba DOI
	Generating Precise Error Specifications for C: A Zero Shot Learning Approach OOPSLA Baijun Wu, John Peter Campora, He Yi, Alexander Schlecht, Sheng Chen DOI
	Getafix: Learning to Fix Bugs Automatically OOPSLA Johannes Bader, Andrew Scott, Michael Pradel, Satish Chandra DOI Pre-print
	Improving Bug Detection via Context-Based Code Representation Learning and Attention-Based Neural Networks OOPSLA Yi Li, Shaohua Wang, Tien N. Nguyen, Son Nguyen DOI
	Initialize Once, Start Fast: Application Initialization at Build Time OOPSLA Christian Wimmer, Codrut Stancu, Peter Hofer, Vojin Jovanovic, Paul Wögerer, Peter B. Kessler, Oleg Pliss, Thomas Wuerthinger DOI Pre-print
	IntelliMerge: A Refactoring-Aware Software Merging Technique OOPSLA Bo Shen, Wei Zhang, Haiyan Zhao, Guangtai Liang, Zhi Jin, Qianxiang Wang DOI
	I/O Dependent Idempotence Bugs in Intermittent Systems OOPSLA Milijana Surbatovich, Limin Jia, Brandon Lucia DOI
	IVT: An Efficient Method for Sharing Subtype Polymorphic Objects OOPSLA Yu-Ping Wang, Xu-Qiang Hu, Zi-Xin Zou, Wende Tan, Gang (Gary) Tan DOI
	Language-Integrated Privacy-Aware Distributed Queries OOPSLA Guido Salvaneschi, Mirko Köhler, Daniel Sokolowski, Philipp Haller, Sebastian Erdweg, Mira Mezini DOI
	Leveraging Rust Types for Modular Specification and Verification OOPSLA Vytautas Astrauskas, Peter Müller, Federico Poli, Alexander J. Summers DOI Pre-print
	Mergeable Replicated Data Types OOPSLA Gowtham Kaki, Swarn Priya, KC Sivaramakrishnan, Suresh Jagannathan Link to publication DOI
	Modular Verification for Almost-Sure Termination of Probabilistic Programs OOPSLA Mingzhang Huang, Hongfei Fu, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Amir Kafshdar Goharshady DOI
	Modular Verification of Heap Reachability Properties in Separation Logic OOPSLA Arshavir Ter-Gabrielyan, Alexander J. Summers, Peter Müller Link to publication DOI Pre-print File Attached
	Modular Verification of Web Page Layout OOPSLA Pavel Panchekha, Michael D. Ernst, Zachary Tatlock, Shoaib Kamil DOI
	On the Complexity of Checking Transactional Consistency OOPSLA Ranadeep Biswas, Constantin Enea DOI
	On the Design, Implementation, and Use of Laziness in R OOPSLA Aviral Goel, Jan Vitek DOI Pre-print
	On the Fly Synthesis of Edit Suggestions OOPSLA Anders Miltner, Sumit Gulwani, Vu Le, Alan Leung, Arjun Radhakrishna, Gustavo Soares, Ashish Tiwari, Abhishek Udupa DOI Pre-print Media Attached
	On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code QualityTOPLAS OOPSLA Emery D. Berger, Celeste Hollenbeck, Petr Maj, Olga Vitek, Jan Vitek Link to publication DOI Pre-print
	Optimal Stateless Model Checking for Reads-From Equivalence under Sequential Consistency OOPSLA Parosh Aziz Abdulla, Mohamed Faouzi Atig, Bengt Jonsson, Magnus Lång, Tuan Phong Ngo, Konstantinos (Kostis) Sagonas DOI Pre-print
	Optimization of Swift Protocols OOPSLA Raj Barik, Manu Sridharan, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Milind Chabbi DOI
	PlanAlyzer: Assessing Threats to the Validity of Online Experiments OOPSLA Emma Tosch, Eytan Bakshy, Emery D. Berger, David Jensen, Eliot Moss DOI
	Precise Reasoning with Structured Time, Structured Heaps, and Collective Operations OOPSLA Gregory Essertel, Guannan Wei, Tiark Rompf DOI
	Precision-Preserving Yet Fast Object-Sensitive Pointer Analysis with Partial Context Sensitivity OOPSLA Jingbo Lu, Jingling Xue DOI
	Probabilistic Verification of Fairness Properties via Concentration OOPSLA Osbert Bastani, Xin Zhang, Armando Solar-Lezama DOI
	Program Synthesis with Algebraic Library Specifications OOPSLA Benjamin Mariano, Josh Reese, Siyuan Xu, ThanhVu Nguyen, Xiaokang Qiu, Jeffrey S. Foster, Armando Solar-Lezama DOI
	PYE: A Framework for Precise-Yet-Efficient Just-In-Time Analyses for Java ProgramsTOPLAS OOPSLA Manas Thakur, V Krishna Nandivada
	Qubit Allocation as a Combination of Subgraph Isomorphism and Token Swapping OOPSLA Marcos Yukio Siraichi, Vinícius Fernandes dos Santos, Caroline Collange, Fernando Magno Quintão Pereira DOI Pre-print
	Refinement Kinds: Type-Safe Programming with Practical Type-Level Computation OOPSLA Luís Caires, Bernardo Toninho DOI
	Reflection-Aware Static Regression Test Selection OOPSLA August Shi, Milica Hadzi-Tanovic, Lingming Zhang, Darko Marinov, Owolabi Legunsen DOI
	Relational Verification using Reinforcement Learning OOPSLA Jia Chen, Jiayi Wei, Yu Feng, Osbert Bastani, Işıl Dillig DOI
	Reliable and Fast DWARF-Based Stack Unwinding OOPSLA Théophile Bastian, Stephen Kell, Francesco Zappa Nardelli Link to publication DOI File Attached
	Ryū Revisited: Printf Floating Point Conversion OOPSLA Ulf Adams Link to publication DOI
	Safer Smart Contract Programming with Scilla OOPSLA Ilya Sergey, Vaivaswatha Nagaraj, Jacob Johannsen, Amrit Kumar, Anton Trunov, Ken Chan DOI Pre-print File Attached
	Scala Implicits Are Everywhere: A Large-Scale Study of the Use of Scala Implicits in the Wild OOPSLA Filip Křikava, Heather Miller, Jan Vitek DOI Pre-print
	Seq: A High-Performance Language for Bioinformatics OOPSLA Ariya Shajii, Ibrahim Numanagić, Riyadh Baghdadi, Bonnie Berger, Saman Amarasinghe DOI
	Sound and Reusable Components for Abstract Interpretation OOPSLA Sven Keidel, Sebastian Erdweg DOI
	Specification and Inference of Trace Refinement Relations OOPSLA Timos Antonopoulos, Eric Koskinen, Ton Chanh Le DOI
	Specifying Concurrent Programs in Separation Logic: Morphisms and Simulations OOPSLA Aleksandar Nanevski, Anindya Banerjee, Germán Andrés Delbianco, Ignacio Fábregas Link to publication DOI
	Staged Abstract Interpreters: Fast and Modular Whole-Program Analysis via Meta-programming OOPSLA Guannan Wei, Yuxuan Chen, Tiark Rompf DOI
	Static Analysis with Demand-Driven Value Refinement OOPSLA Benno Stein, Benjamin Barslev Nielsen, Bor-Yuh Evan Chang, Anders Møller DOI Pre-print
	System FR: Formalized Foundations for the Stainless Verifier OOPSLA Jad Hamza, Nicolas Voirol, Viktor Kunčak DOI
	TLA+ Model Checking Made Symbolic OOPSLA Igor Konnov, Jure Kukovec, Thanh-Hai Tran DOI
	Trace Aware Random Testing for Distributed Systems OOPSLA Burcu Kulahcioglu Ozkan, Rupak Majumdar, Simin Oraee DOI
	Value-Centric Dynamic Partial Order Reduction OOPSLA Krishnendu Chatterjee, Andreas Pavlogiannis, Viktor Toman DOI
	Verifying Safety and Accuracy of Approximate Parallel Programs via Canonical Sequentialization OOPSLA Vimuth Fernando, Keyur Joshi, Sasa Misailovic DOI
	Weakening WebAssembly OOPSLA Conrad Watt, Andreas Rossberg, Jean Pichon-Pharabod DOI
	Weak Persistency Semantics from the Ground Up: Formalising the Persistency Semantics of ARMv8 and Transactional Models OOPSLA Azalea Raad, John Wickerson, Viktor Vafeiadis DOI

Call for Papers

Papers appear in an issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACMPL). PACMPL is a Gold Open Access journal, all papers will be freely available to the public. Authors can voluntarily cover the article processing charge (400$), but payment is not required.

Paper Selection Criteria

We consider the following criteria when evaluating papers:

Novelty: The paper presents new ideas and results and places them appropriately within the context established by previous research.

Importance: The paper contributes to the advancement of knowledge in the field. We also welcome papers that diverge from the dominant trajectory of the field.

Evidence: The paper presents sufficient evidence supporting its claims, such as proofs, implemented systems, experimental results, statistical analyses, case studies, and anecdotes.

Clarity: The paper presents its contributions, methodology and results clearly.

Review Process

A two-stage process with lightweight double-blind reviewing is used to select papers. This FAQ address common concerns.

The first reviewing stage assess papers using the above criteria. At the end of that stage a set of papers is conditionally accepted.

Authors of conditionally accepted papers must make a set of mandatory revisions. The second reviewing phase assesses whether the revisions have been addressed. The expectation is that the revisions can be addressed and that conditionally accepted papers will be accepted in the second phase.

The second submission must be accompanied by a cover letter mapping each mandatory revision request to specific parts of the paper.

Submission Requirements

For double-blind reviewing papers must adhere to three rules:

1. author names and institutions must be omitted, and
2. references to authors’ own related work should be in the third person (e.g., not “We build on our previous work …” but rather “We build on the work of …”), and
3. any supplementary material should be similarly anonymized

The purpose of this process is to help reviewers come to an initial judgement about the paper without bias, not to make it impossible for them to discover the authors if they were to try. Nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing the paper more difficult.

Submissions must conform to both the ACM Policies for Authorship and SIGPLAN’s Republication Policy. Authors will be required to sign a license or copyright release.

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library, which may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference.

Artifact Evaluation

Authors of conditionally accepted papers are encouraged to submit supporting materials for Artifact Evaluation.
Authors should indicate with their initial submission if an artifact exists and describe its nature and limitations.

Further information is here.

Questions

For additional information or answers to questions please write to oopsla@splashcon.org.

Notice: Supplementary materials must be anonymized!

Submission Preparation Instructions

PACMPL (OOPSLA) employs a two-stage, lightweight double-blind reviewing process, so papers must be anonymized.

Formatting: Submissions must be in PDF, printable in black and white on US Letter sized paper. All submissions must adhere to the “ACM Small” template available (in both LaTeX and Word formats) from http://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions. For LaTeX users, please use acmart-pacmpl-template.tex, a lighter-weight package including only essential files, with the acmsmall, anonymous and review options. LaTeX-specific questions are fielded by the ACM.

Submitted papers may be at most 23 pages in 10 point font, excluding bibliographic references and appendices.

There is no page limit for bibliographic references and appendices. However, reviewers are not obligated to read the appendices.

Submissions do not meet the above requirements will be rejected without review.

Citations: Papers are expected to use author-year citations. Author-year citations may be used as either a noun phrase, such as “The lambda calculus was originally conceived by Church (1932)”, or a parenthetic phase, such as “The lambda calculus (Church 1932) was intended as a foundation for mathematics”. (Either parentheses or square brackets can be used to enclose the citations.) A useful test for correct usage it to make sure that the text still reads correctly when the parenthesized portions of any references are omitted. Take care with prepositions; in the first example above, “by” is more appropriate than “in” because it allows the text to be read correctly as a reference to the author. Sometimes, readability may be improved by putting parenthetic citations at the end of a clause or a sentence, such as “A foundation for mathematics was provided by the lambda calculus (Church 1932)”. In LaTeX, use \citet{Church-1932} for citations as a noun phrase, “Church (1932)”, and \citep{Church-1932} for citations as a parenthetic phrase, “(Church 1932)”; for details, see Sections 2.3–2.5 of the natbib documentation (natbib).

Author Response Period: from June 7-11, 2019 authors will be able to read reviews and respond to them.

Supplementary Materials: authors may attach anonymous supplementary material to a submission, on the understanding that reviewers may choose not to look at it. The material should be uploaded at submission time, as a single pdf or a tarball, not via a URL. This supplementary material should be anonymized.

Authorship Policies: All submissions are expected to comply with the ACM Policies for Authorship.

Republication Policies: Papers must describe unpublished work that is not currently submitted for publication elsewhere as described by SIGPLAN’s Republication Policy. Submitters should also be aware of ACM’s Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism.

Information for Authors of Accepted Papers

• The page limit for final versions of papers is 27 pages (excluding references) to ensure that authors have space to respond to reviewer comments and mandatory revisions.
• PACMPL is a Gold Open Access journal. Authors may voluntarily cover the article processing charges (currently 400 USD).
• We welcome all authors to attend OOPSLA and present accepted papers, regardless of nationality. If any author has visa-related difficulties, we will make arrangements to enable remote participation.
• The official publication date is the date the papers are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

The following content is based on Mike Hicks’s guidelines with input from Frank Tip, Keshav Pingali, Richard Jones, John Boyland, Yannis Smaragdakis and Jonathan Aldrich.

General

Q: Why double-blind reviewing?

A: Our goal is to give each a reviewer an unbiased “first look” at each paper. Studies have shown that a reviewer’s attitude toward a submission may be affected, even unconsciously, by the identity of the author. We want reviewers to be able to approach each submission without such involuntary reactions as “Barnaby; he writes a good paper” or “Who are these people? I have never heard of them.” For this reason, we ask that authors to omit their names from their submissions, and that they avoid revealing their identity through citation. A key principle to keep in mind is that we intend this process to be cooperative, not adversarial. If a reviewer does discover an author’s identity though a subtle clue or oversight the author will not be penalized.

Q: Do you think blinding works?

A: Studies of blinding with the flavor we are using show that author identities remain unknown 53% to 79% of the time. Moreover, about 5-10% of the time, a reviewer is certain of the authors, but then turns out to be at least partially mistaken. Yannis Smaragdakis’s survey of the OOPSLA 2016 PC showed that any given reviewer or a paper guessed at least one author correctly only 26-34% of the time, depending on whether you count a non-response to the survey as failure to guess or failure to answer. So, while sometimes authorship can be guessed correctly, the question is, is imperfect blinding better than no blinding at all? Our conjecture is that on balance the answer is “yes”.

Q: Can blind submission cause a paper to be rejected based on prior work by the same authors?

A: Author names are revealed to reviewers after they have submitted their review and before final decisions are made. Therefore, a reviewer can correct their review if they indeed have penalized the authors inappropriately. Unblinding prior to the PC meeting also avoids cases in which reviewers end up advancing the cause of a paper with which they have a conflict.

For Authors

Q: What do I have to do?

A: Your job is not to make your identity undiscoverable but simply to make it possible for our reviewers to evaluate your submission without having to know who you are. The main guidelines are simple: omit authors’ names from your title page, and when you cite your own work, refer to it in the third person. For example, if your name is Smith and you have worked on amphibious type systems, instead of saying “We extend our earlier work on statically typed toads (Smith 2004),” you might say “We extend Smith’s (2004) earlier work on statically typed toads.” Also, be sure not to include any acknowledgements that would give away your identity.

Q: How do I provide supplementary material?

A: On the submission site there will be an option to submit supplementary material along with your paper. This supplementary material should be anonymized. Reviewers are under no obligation to look at this material. The submission itself is the object of review and so it should strive to convince the reader of at least the plausibility of reported results. Of course, reviewers are free to change their review upon viewing supplemental material. For those authors who wish to supplement, we encourage them to mention the supplement in the body of the paper. E.g., “The proof of Lemma 1 is included in the anonymous supplemental material submitted with this paper.”

Q: I am building on my work on the XYZ system. Do I rename it for anonymity?

A: No, you must not change the name and you should certainly cite your published past work on it! The relationship between systems and authors changes over time, so there will be at least some doubt about authorship.

Q: Can I submit a paper that extends a workshop paper?

A: Generally yes, but the ideal course of action depends on the degree of similarity and on publication status. On one extreme, if your workshop paper is a publication (i.e., the workshop has published a proceedings, with your paper in it) and your current submission improves on that work, then you should cite the workshop paper as if it were written by someone else. On the other extreme, if your submission is effectively a longer, more complete version of an unpublished workshop paper (e.g., no formal proceedings), then you should include a (preferably anonymous) version of the workshop paper as supplementary material. In general, there is rarely a good reason to anonymize a citation. When in doubt, contact the PC Chair.

Q: Am I allowed to post my paper on my web page, advertise it on mailing lists, send it to colleagues or give talks?

A: Double-blind reviewing should not hinder the usual communication of results. That said, we do ask that you not attempt to deliberately subvert the double-blind reviewing process by announcing the names of the authors of your paper to the potential reviewers of your paper. It is difficult to define exactly what counts as “subversion” here, but a blatant example would include sending individual e-mail to members of the PC about your work. On the other hand, it is fine to visit other institutions and give talks about your work, to present your submitted work during job interviews, to present your work at professional meetings, or to post your work on your web page. PC members will not be asked to recuse themselves from reviewing your paper unless they feel you have gone out of your way to advertise your authorship information to them. If you’re not sure about what constitutes “going out of your way”, please consult directly with the Program Chair.

We recognize that some researchers practice an open research style in which work is shared on mailing lists, arxiv, or social media as it is produced. We think this style of research can coexist with double-blind reviewing if authors follow simple guidelines. You may post to mailing lists, arxiv, social media, or another publicity channel about your work, but do not mention where the paper is submitted and do not use the exact, as-submitted title in the posting.

Q: Does double-blind have an impact on handling conflicts-of interest?

A: No. As an author, you should list PC members (and any others, since others may be asked for outside reviewers) who you believe have a conflict with you.

For Reviewers

Q: What should I do if I if I learn the authors’ identity?

A: If at any point you feel that the authors’ actions are largely aimed at ensuring that potential reviewers know their identity, you should contact the Program Chair. Otherwise you should not treat double-blind reviewing differently from regular blind reviewing. In particular, you should refrain from seeking out information on the authors’ identity, but if you discover it accidentally this will not automatically disqualify you as a reviewer. Use your best judgment.

Q: The authors provided a URL to supplemental material, I worry they will snoop my IP address. What should I do?

A: Contact the Program Chair, who will download the material on your behalf and make it available to you.

Q: Can I seek an outside review?

A: No. PC members should do their own reviews. If doing so is problematic, e.g., you don’t feel qualified, then consider the following options. First, submit a review that is as careful as possible, outlining areas where you think your knowledge is lacking. Assuming we have sufficient expert reviews, that could be the end of it: non-expert reviews are valuable too. Second, the review form provides a mechanism for suggesting additional expert reviewers to the PC Chair, who may contact them if additional expertise is needed.

The Proceedings of the ACM series presents the highest quality research conducted in diverse areas of computer science, as represented by the ACM Special Interest Groups (SIGs). The ACM Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACMPL) focuses on research on all aspects of programming languages, from design to implementation and from mathematical formalisms to empirical studies. The journal operates in close collaboration with the Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) and is committed to making high-quality peer-reviewed scientific research in programming languages free of restrictions on both access and use.

This issue of the PACMPL journal publishes 73 articles that were submitted in response to a call for papers seeking contributions on all aspects of programming languages and software engineering with articles targeting any stage of software development, including requirements, modeling, prototyping, design, implementation, generation, analysis, verification, testing, evaluation, maintenance, and reuse of software systems, and contributions including the development of new tools (such as language front-ends, program analyses, and runtime systems), new techniques (such as methodologies, design processes, and code organization approaches), new principles (such as formalisms, proofs, models, and paradigms), and new evaluations (such as experiments, corpora analyses, user studies, and surveys).

The articles were selected from 201 submissions — submitted by the April 2019 deadline for this issue — by means of a rigorous reviewing process. In the two-stage process, articles were evaluated with respect to the novelty and importance of their results, the evidence for these results, and the clarity of their presentation. In the first stage, each article was reviewed by at least three reviewers during a nine week review period. Additional reviews were sollicited for several articles to obtain additional expert opinions. Reviews were conducted by the members of a primary review committee, a secondary review committee, and external reviewers. Authors were invited to submit a detailed response to the reviews. Based on the reviews, the author response, a one week online discussion, and a two day physical meeting of the primary review committee in Phoenix, Arizona, 10 articles were accepted with minor revisions and 63 articles required major revisions. The first stage was double blind; submissions were anonymous and the identity of authors was only revealed after the review period when that was necessary for the evaluation process, which happened only in a couple of cases. In the second stage, authors submitted non-anonymous revisions after a six week revision period with a cover letter explaining how they addressed the feedback from reviewers. Major revisions were re-reviewed by the original reviewers during a two week review period, determining whether the required revisions were satisfied. The authors of two articles were asked to make further required revisions.

I am excited by the compelling and thought-provoking work that resulted in this PACMPL issue. To provoke further discussion and dissemination, the authors were invited to also present their work to the programming languages community at the next ACM OOPSLA conference. I hope that you will also join us in October 20-25, 2019 in Athens, Greece for SPLASH/OOPSLA 2019. The conference will provide many opportunities to share ideas with programming language researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world.

It was an honor and a privilege to serve as Associate Editor for this issue of PACMPL, and I would like to thank the many people who contributed to make this a success. First, I would like to thank all the authors for contributing their work.

Second, I would like to thank the reviewers for their hard work. They have provided very useful feedback to the authors, helping them to improve their work. The high quality of the articles in this issue is also the result of their work. The Primary Review Committee consisted of Sara Achour, Nada Amin, Bor-Yuh Evan Chang, Arthur Charguéraud, Yufei Ding, Alastair Donaldson, Sebastian Erdweg, Ronald Garcia, David Grove, Görel Hedin, Martin Hirzel, Marieke Huisman, Gail Kaiser, Eric Koskinen, Ondřej Lhoták, Yu David Liu, Brandon Lucia, Heather Miller, Todd Mytkowicz, Alex Potanin, Tiark Rompf, Manu Sridharan, Friedrich Steimann, Éric Tanter, Ross Tate, Emina Torlak, David Van Horn, Eric Van Wyk, Harry Xu, Nobuko Yoshida, and Francesco Zappa Nardelli. The Secondary Review Committee consisted of Aggelos Biboudis, Gavin Bierman, Walter Binder, Eva Darulova, Werner Dietl, Isil Dillig, Sophia Drossopoulou, Susan Eisenbach, Matthew Flatt, Jeremy Gibbons, Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Sam Guyer, Christine H. Flood, Jeff Huang, Ranjit Jhala, Stephen Kell, Viktor Kuncak, Christian Kästner, Crista Lopes, Sasa Misailovic, Andrew Myers, Iulian Neamtiu, Benjamin C. Pierce, G. Ramalingam, Grigore Rosu, Malavika Samak, Jennifer B. Sartor, Peter Sewell, Xipeng Shen, Michael Steindorfer, Peter Thiemann, and Viktor Vafeiadis. The External Reviewers were Aws Albarghouthi, Timothy Bourke, Edwin Brady, David Darais, Julian Dolby, Marco Gaboardi, Rahul Gopinath, Andrew D. Gordon, Marco Guarnieri, Holger Hermanns, Felienne Hermans, Jeroen Keiren, Dan Kifer, Robbert Krebbers, Shuvendu Lahiri, Mohsen Lesani, Christof Lofi, Roman Manevich, Darya Melicher, Leo Meyerovich, Peter Müller, Bruno Oliveira, Aurojit Panda, Alexander Ratner, John Regehr, Thomas Reps, Manuel Serrano, Alexander J. Summers, Petar Tsankov, Alex Weddell, Andy Zaidman, and Hengchu Zhang.

Third I would like to thank the SPLASH 2019 conference and its General Chair, Yannis Smaragdakis, for providing the authors of this issue the opportunity to present their work.

Finally, I would like to thank the PACMPL Editorial Board and its Editor in Chief Philip Wadler for their advise, and I would like to thank SIGPLAN and its Executive Committee chaired by Jens Palsberg for supporting the gold open access publication of the articles in PACMPL and for organizing a thriving programming language community that produces high quality research as exemplified in this issue.

– Eelco Visser, Associate Editor