PLDI is a premier forum for all areas of programming language research, including the design, implementation, theory, and efficient use of languages. PLDI seeks outstanding research that has broad appeal and spans the breadth of programming languages. PLDI’s emphases include innovative and creative approaches to compile-time and runtime technology, novel language designs and features, and results from implementations.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

PLDI is a premier forum for all areas of programming language research, including the design, implementation, theory, and efficient use of languages. PLDI seeks outstanding research that has broad appeal and spans the breadth of programming languages. PLDI’s emphases include innovative and creative approaches to compile-time and runtime technology, novel language designs and features, and results from implementations. Papers are solicited on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Language designs and extensions
• Static and dynamic analysis of programs
• Domain-specific languages and tools
• Type systems and program logics
• Program transformation and optimization
• Checking or improving the security or correctness of programs
• Memory management
• Parallelism, both implicit and explicit
• Performance and energy analysis, evaluation, and tools
• Novel programming models
• Debugging techniques and tools
• Program understanding
• Interaction of compilers/runtimes with underlying systems
• Program synthesis

PLDI welcomes new topics.

Submissions

Please note that formatting requirements for PLDI’15 will be different to previous years. Details can be found in the Instructions for Authors.

The submission deadline is past. The submission site was.

To enable double-blind reviewing, author names and their affiliations must be omitted from submissions, and references to related work by the authors should be in the third person (e.g., not “We build on our previous work …” but rather “We build on the work of …”). However, nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing the paper more difficult (e.g., important background references should not be omitted or anonymized). If you have questions about the logistics for the double-blind reviewing process, please look at the double-blind reviewing FAQ.

Papers must describe unpublished work that is not currently submitted for publication elsewhere as described by SIGPLAN’s Republication Policy.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.

Evaluation Criteria

The program committee and the external review committee will evaluate the technical contribution of each submission as well as its general accessibility to the PLDI audience. Papers will be judged on significance, originality, and clarity. The paper must be organized so that it is easily understood by an audience with varied expertise. The paper should clearly identify what has been accomplished, why it is significant, and how it relates to previous work.

Review Process

The PLDI’15 review process will use two phases in order to balance the need for high quality reviews, the growing number of paper submissions, and the practical limits on program committee size. In the first phase, each paper will receive at least three reviews from which the PC and ERC will identify those papers most viable for publication in PLDI’15. Those papers progressing to the second phase will receive a further two reviews. Authors of papers that do not progress will be notified promptly, giving authors as much opportunity as possible to further develop their work. Each phase will have an author response mechanism, on the principle that authors should have the opportunity to respond to each review. The majority of papers will be given the opportunity for author response at the end of the first phase. Some papers may be promoted directly to the second phase without author response (authors of such papers would be notified). Authors are not required nor able to revise their submission after the initial paper submission deadline.

Artifact Evaluation Process

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to formally submit these supporting materials to the Artifact Evaluation process. The Artifact Evaluation process, is run by a separate committee whose task is to assess how the artifacts support the work described in the papers. This submission is voluntary and will not influence the final decision regarding the papers. Papers that go through the Artifact Evaluation process successfully will receive a seal of approval printed on the papers themselves. Additional information will be available on the PLDI AEC web page closer to the submission deadline.

Publication

Authors of accepted papers will be required to sign an ACM copyright release.

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: All accepted papers will be available in the ACM Digital Library as early as May 30, 2015. The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

The full PLDI 2015 proceedings are freely available via ACM OpenTOC at http://sigplan.org/OpenTOC/pldi16.html.

Overview

This page contains information for authors of papers accepted to appear at PLDI’15.

As an author you need to:

• Prepare a camera-ready version of your paper.
• Ensure your personal and paper profiles are up to date on this website.
• Prepare a video abstract of your talk.
• Prepare your talk.
• Prepare a poster.

Details of these appear below.

Key Dates:

• Revisions to shepherds due Fri 6 March, 2015 (shepherded papers).
• Camera ready copy due Wed April 15, 2015.
• Video abstract due Fri May 29, 2015.
• Papers may be available on the ACM Digital Library as early as Sat May 30, 2015.
• Conference Sat 13 - Wed 17 Jun, 2015.

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: All accepted papers will be available in the ACM Digital Library as early as May 30, 2015. The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Camera Ready Paper Formatting Instructions

Please carefully follow the instructions in the email you will receive from Conference Publishing on how to format and then submit your camera-ready paper. An overview of those instructions is available here. It is important to note that the camera-ready format (optimized for publication) is different from the submission format (optimized for reviewing).

Accepted papers will be formatted strictly using the default 9pt ACM SIGPLAN format. Please use the style file that you find at the SIGPLAN website. As at Feb 16, the SIGPLAN website offers version 2.8 of the style file (released in July 2013). We are expecting a new version. We hope that SIGPLAN will release the new version in time for the camera-ready deadline. If that happens you will be notified, and asked to use the new version. We are told by the maintainers that the transition to the new version will be easy for you because aside from fixing problems with the copyright notice, it will otherwise produce the same output as version 2.8. Update: as at April 13, the new version is still not available, so you’ll need to make do with the old style file.

Highlights:

• Default 9pt ACM SIGPLAN format.
• 10 pages, 9pt, inclusive of bibliography.
• You may purchase up to two additional pages (USD$150/pp, to be paid when registering for the conference).

Personal and Paper Profiles on researchr.org

All authors of accepted papers should have received an email with a link to activate your account on this website (researchr.org). If you have not already done so, please activate your account. You should use your account to update your personal information and ensure that the details of your paper reported here are correct (link at top right of each page). Specifically:

• Please update your personal profile.
• Please ensure the title and abstract of your paper are correct.
• Please upload additional material associated with the paper such as slides and a link to your video, if you wish.

Presentation

You will have a 25 minute slot for your presentation. You should budget 20 minutes for your talk, plus 4 minutes for questions and a minute for transitions between talks. You should expect your session chair to rigorously adhere to the schedule. Chairs have been asked to display a count-down timer; please check with your chair before your session. You are strongly encouraged to test your equipment in the room in which you will be presenting well before your talk; you should be able to do so during a scheduled break or before the day’s proceedings start. Note that video abstracts will be shown in the last 5-10 minutes prior to each session starting. You will not be able to test your laptop at that time.

The venue has advised us that the rooms will have projectors that natively support the common 4:3 aspect ratio (i.e. not widescreen). You may wish to format your slides accordingly so as to maximise your utilisation of the available screen. (This is unrelated to and does not affect the requirements for video presentations, described below).

Prior to the conference, please check the schedule to confirm when your talk will appear. You should identify yourself to your session chair well before the start of your session.

There is plenty of advice online on how to prepare a good technical talk. Here are a few examples:

• Mark Hill
• Jennifer Widom
• Jonathan Shewchuk
• Nick Nethercote
• Mike Dahlin
• Emily Lakdawalla

Video Abstract

Authors are asked to prepare a 60 second video abstract for each paper (We revised the length down from 90s according to scheduling constraints. If this revision is a major problem for you, please contact the program chair no later than May 1.) PLDI will be multitrack, and the video abstracts will allow attendees a greater opportunity to preview what they might expect at a given session as well as providing you with an additional opportunity to promote your work.

The video abstracts will be used instead of live presentations during one minute madness, which are used to publicising talks in the multi-track PLDI schedule.

You are encouraged to provide a link to your video to publisher Conference Publishing, and they will include it in the conference app (provided by Conference Publishing).

You are also encouraged to include it on the conference website (the site you’re looking at now) by providing a link via your paper’s profile (you can also upload slides and other such material).

Submission

Once your video is ready, please use this form to make it available to the PC chair. Please carefully note the formatting requirements below and the requirement that your link be to a file, not an embedded video (such as youtube). The form is configured to allow you to edit it afterwards, so if your information changes any time before the deadline, please just go back and edit the form. You should feel free to update your video at any time until the deadline. Please contact the PC Chair if you have any questions or concerns.

Requirements

Content

• Should summarise paper.
• Should motivate attendance at talk (we have two tracks; try to entice the audience to attend your talk!!)
• Be creative!

Format

• Your video must be made available as a file ( not embedded video via youtube etc).
• No more than 60 seconds.
• Use mp4, avi, flv, mov, or wmv encoding (or if that’s not possible, one of the other standard youtube-supported video formats ).
• 720p (1280 x 720) resolution. (You may need to explicitly configure your screen resolution to 1280 x 720 before recording, and you may need to adjust your presentation tool to ensure that it uses a 16:9 aspect ratio for the video.)
• Ensure that your recording has good audio and video quality. It will be played to an audience in a large conference room.
• Avoid including a “title page”. We will prepend a standard title page with title, authors and schedule info.
• Avoid including your title and authorship on each slide, we will be adding this automatically; there’s no need for you to include it.

If you are unable to meet the formatting requirements, the scripts that compile the videos for one minute madness will automatically rescale videos to 720p format if they are of the incorrect size, and will speed videos up to fit in the allotted 60 seconds if they are over-length.

Tips and Help

Please take care to ensure that the audio and video quality is good. A muffled voice will detract from your video, particularly when amplified in a large conference room.

One way to create your video abstract is to narrate a slide deck. PowerPoint for windows allows you to create videos directly. Otherwise you can use screen capture software, and create a recording as you present your talk on your computer. For many or most such tools, you will need to ensure that you have the aspect ratio of your presentation software set correctly to 16:9, and your screen resolution set to 1280x720. Software for creating such a video is available on most platforms:

• Linux: Freeseer, and a recent list of editing software, which concludes that blender’s video editing features may be the best option.
• Mac OS X: use QuickTime’s built-in recording feature or Camtasia.
• Windows: from PowerPoint (note that this technique does not work for MacOS PowerPoint), or Camtasia.

There’s lots of advice online on how to create a good video abstract. Here’s a sample:

• How to make a good video abstract
• Make a video abstract for your research
• Coming soon to a journal near you: video abstracts
• Don’t be shy, create a video abstract
• Create a video abstract
• How to create a video abstract (youtube)

Remember, for PLDI you only have 90 60 seconds; a very succinct abstract!!

Posters

We will be holding a poster session in conjunction with the PLDI’15 Welcome Reception. The poster session will be on Sunday evening (7:30PM-9:00PM) immediately after the Turing Lecture and will include drinks and light refreshments. The poster session will be for authors of all accepted papers as well as those participating in the Student Research Competition. Posters provide another medium for publicising your work, and poster sessions can be a lot of fun. We strongly encourage you to prepare a poster.

Guidelines and Advice

• 4’ x 3’ / ISO A0 (1189mm x 841mm, 47" x 33").
• You can find latex templates here.
• Some advice on how to prepare a good poster.

General

Q: Why are you using double-blind reviewing?

A: 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. Note that many systems and security conferences use double-blind reviewing and have done so for years (e.g., SIGCOMM, OSDI, IEEE Security and Privacy, SIGMOD). PLDI has done it for several years now. 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 really think blinding actually works? I suspect reviewers can often guess who the authors are anyway.

A: Authorship can be guessed correctly sometimes, but imperfect blinding is better than no blinding at all, we believe.

Q: Couldn't blind submission create an injustice where a paper is inappropriately rejected based upon supposedly-prior work which was actually by the same authors and not previously published?

A: Reviewers are held accountable for their positions and are required to identify any supposed prior work that they believe undermines the novelty of the paper. Any assertion that 'this has been done before' must be supported with concrete information which can be checked by the PC Chair and by authors vial the author response mechanism. The author response mechanism exists in part to hold reviewers accountable for their positions; authors can and should correct any such misapprehension.

For authors

Q: What exactly do I have to do to anonymize my paper?

A: Use common sense. 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 specific guidelines stated in the call for papers 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: I would like to provide supplementary material for consideration, e.g., the code of my implementation or proofs of theorems. How do I do this?

A: (see the next question also) On the submission site there will be an option to submit supplementary material along with your main paper. This supplementary material should also 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; supplemental material only serves to confirm, in more detail, the idea argued in the paper. Of course, reviewers are free to change their review upon viewing supplemental material (or for any other reason). 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 supplemental material submitted with this paper."

Q: My submission is based on code available in a public repository. How do I deal with this?

A: Making your code publicly available is not incompatible with the double blind process. You should do the following. First, cite the code in your paper, but remove the actual URL and, instead say "link to repository removed for double blind review" or similar. Second, if when writing your author response, you believe reviewer access to your code would help, say so in your author response (without providing the URL), and send the URL to the Program Chair. Third, you are strongly encouraged to submit your work to the Artefact Evaluation track.

Q: I am building on my own past work on the WizWoz system. Do I need to rename this system in my paper for purposes of anonymity, so as to remove the implied connection between my authorship of past work on this system and my present submission?

A: No. The relationship between systems and authors changes over time, so there will be at least some doubt about authorship. Increasing this doubt by changing the system name would help with anonymity, but it would compromise the research process. In particular, changing the name requires explaining a lot about the system again because you can't just refer to the existing papers, which use the proper name. Not citing these papers runs the risk of the reviewers who know about the existing system thinking you are replicating earlier work. It is also confusing for the reviewers to read about the paper under Name X and then have the name be changed to Name Y. Will all the reviewers go and re-read the final version with the correct name? If not, they have the wrong name in their heads, which could be harmful in the long run.

Q: I am submitting a paper that extends my own work that previously appeared at a workshop. Should I anonymize any reference to that prior work?

A: No. But we recommend you do not use the same title for your PLDI submission, so that it is clearly distinguished from the prior paper. In general there is rarely a good reason to anonymize a citation. One possibility is for work that is tightly related to the present submission and is also under review. But such works may often be non-anonymous. When in doubt, contact the PC Chair.

Q: Am I allowed to post my (non-blinded) paper on my web page? Can I advertise the unblinded version of my paper on mailing lists or send it to colleagues? May I give a talk about my work while it is under review?

A: As far as the authors' publicity actions are concerned, a paper under double-blind review is largely the same as a paper under regular (single-blind) review. 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 some blatant examples include: sending individual e-mail to members of the PC or ERC about your work (unless they are conflicted out anyway), or posting mail to a major mailing list (e.g. TYPES) announcing your paper. On the other hand, it is perfectly fine, for example, 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 (e.g. Dagstuhl), or to post your work on your web page. PC/ERC 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.

Q: Will the fact that PLDI is double-blind have an impact on handling conflicts-of interest?

A: Using DBR does not change the principle that reviewers should not review papers with which they have a conflict of interest, even if they do not immediately know who the authors are. Quoting (with slight alteration) from the ACM SIGPLAN review policies document:
A conflict of interest is defined as a situation in which the reviewer can be viewed as being able to benefit personally in the process of reviewing a paper. For example, if a reviewer is considering a paper written by a member of his own group, a current student, his advisor, or a group that he is seen as being in close competition with, then the outcome of the review process can have direct benefit to the reviewer's own status. If a conflict of interest exists, the potential reviewer should decline to review the paper.

For reviewers

Q: What should I do if I if I learn the authors' identity? What should I do if a prospective PLDI author contacts me and asks to visit my institution?

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 have provided a URL to supplemental material. I would like to see the material but I worry they will snoop my IP address and learn my identity. What should I do?

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

Q: If I am assigned a paper for which I feel I am not an expert, how do I seek an outside review?

A: PC and ERC members should do their own reviews, not delegate them to someone else. If doing so is problematic for some papers, e.g., you don't feel completely qualified, then consider the following options. First, submit a review for your paper 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, since conference attendees are by-and-large not experts for any given paper. 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. Please do NOT contact outside reviewers yourself. As a last resort, if you feel like your review would be extremely uninformed and you'd rather not even submit a first cut, contact the PC Chair, and another reviewer will be assigned.

Q: How do we handle potential conflicts of interest since I cannot see the author names?

A: The conference review system will ask that you identify conflicts of interest when you get an account on the submission system. Please see the related question applied to authors to decide how to identify conflicts. Feel free to also identify additional authors whose papers you feel you could not review fairly for reasons other than those given (e.g., strong personal friendship).

These guidelines were originally created by Michael Hicks for POPL 2012, slightly modified for PLDI 2012 by Frank Tip. They were shortened by Keshav Pingali for PLDI 2014, and modified slightly by Steve Blackburn for PLDI 2015.

The instructions below are only for the submission and review process.

J. McCarthy. Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, part I. Commun. ACM, 3(4): 184–195, April 1960. doi: 10.1145/367177.367199.

We are using surveys to help us improve PLDI. Thank you to all of those who took the time to complete the survey.

Author Survey

Notification letters for PLDI’15 submissions included an invitation to complete an author survey. Results of the author survey can be found here. Responses are broken down according to the context the response was made in (after phase one rejection, after phase two rejection, and after acceptance). Unsurprisingly, these different cohorts had quite different perspectives on many of the questions.

Reviewer Survey

The PC and ERC were invited to complete a reviewer survey. Results of the reviewer survey can be found here. Responses are broken down according to the committee on which the respondant served.