Last week I attended the 44th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2017). The event was hosted at Paris 6 which is part of the Sorbonne, University of Paris. It was one of the best POPLs I can remember. The papers are both interesting and informative (you can read them all, for free, from the Open TOC), and the talks I attended were generally of very high quality. (Videos of the talks will be available soon—I will add links to this post.) Also, the attendance hit an all-time high: more than 720 people registered for POPL and/or one of its co-located events.
In this blog post I will highlight a few of my favorite papers at this POPL, as well as the co-located N40AI event, which celebrated 40 years of abstract interpretation. Disclaimer: I do not have time to describe all of the great stuff I saw, and I could only see a fraction of the whole event. So just because I don’t mention something here doesn’t mean it isn’t equally great.[ref]I also attended PLMW just before POPL, and gave a talk. I may discuss that in another blog post.[/ref]