notypes.bsky.social
Rachit Nigam
@notypes.bsky.social
920 followers 180 following 95 posts
incoming MIT prof. & director of FLAME lab (https://flame.csail.mit.edu/). building new languages and compilers to make hardware design fast, fun, and correct
flame.csail.mit.edu
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Reposted by Rachit Nigam
jonathanaldrich.bsky.social
Jonathan Aldrich @jonathanaldrich.bsky.social · Aug 26
Q: Is it OK to get the references for my paper from generative AI?

A: Only if you verify they are real & relevant. Submitting a paper with hallucinated references would violate the ACM Policy on Authorship, and your paper will likely be desk rejected.
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Reposted by Rachit Nigam
jangray.bsky.social
Jan @jangray.bsky.social · Aug 27
Congratulations @clairexen.bsky.social: #HotChips / IEEE TCMM 2025 Open Source Hardware Contribution Award
Slide from Hot Chips 2025: "2025 TCMM Open Source Hardware Contribution Award: Claire Wolf: In recognition of outstanding contributions to RISC-V — including BitManip, RVFI, and PicoRV32—and to open-source tools like Yosys and IceStorm. [IEEE Computer Society TCMM / Technical Community on Microprocessors and Microcomputers]"
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notypes.bsky.social
Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jul 7
@sigplan-pldi.bsky.social was an absolute blast this year and had a lot of interesting conversations and papers! I've written down a little retrospective reflecting on some of them: people.csail.mit.edu/rachit/post/...
Reflecting on PLDI 2025 | Rachit Nigam
people.csail.mit.edu
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notypes.bsky.social
Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jul 1
At PLDI this year, I received the SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Distinguished Dissertation award and at ISCA, I received an honorable mention for the SIGARCH / TCCA Outstanding dissertation award!

Truly honored to receive recognition from both the communities! Really excited for what comes next!
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notypes.bsky.social
Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Apr 6
somehow in $CURRENT_YEAR, I still can't get OCaml's LSP to jump to the correct definition for me after hours of debugging....
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Reposted by Rachit Nigam
jingbow.bsky.social
Jingbo Wang @jingbow.bsky.social · Mar 28
PLMW@PLDI'25 is now accepting applications: pldi25.sigplan.org/home/PLMW-pl...

Deadline: April 10, 2025

PLMW an excellent place to learn about exciting PL research, from the ground up, and to find your PL friends!

Please apply!
PLMW @ PLDI 2025 - Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop - PLDI 2025
The Programming Language Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) aims to broaden the exposure of late-stage undergraduate students and early-stage graduate students to research and career opportunities in programmi...
pldi25.sigplan.org
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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Mar 28
implicit public modules baaaaad
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notypes.bsky.social
Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Mar 22
one of us! one of us!
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Reposted by Rachit Nigam
shwestrick.bsky.social
Sam Westrick @shwestrick.bsky.social · Jan 27
SPAA'25 is seeking submissions! Uniquely this year, SPAA seeks a broader set of research areas, including algorithms, systems, PL, applications, quantum, and more. The central theme is parallelism and concurrency.

Deadline: Feb 28

Please consider submitting!

spaa.acm.org/call-for-pap...
Call For Papers – ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures
spaa.acm.org
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notypes.bsky.social
Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 27
Well-deserved! Iris is also a really great example of how well-engineered artifacts make it dramatically easier to pursue technically deep research.
herrdreyer.bsky.social
Derek Dreyer @herrdreyer.bsky.social · Jan 26
Very proud to announce that the first Iris paper received the 2025 Most Influential POPL Paper Award this week. This is a testament to the amazing contributions of a wonderful international network of collaborators.

www.youtube.com/live/ZKwpY0g...
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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 27
What are people's favorite "core systems" textbooks (OS, Networking, Databases, etc.)?
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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 24
Which specific idea? I can think of quite a few bits of things that react has that come from academia.

see ur/web, state monad, a long line of @shriram.bsky.social's work
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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 22
using emacs (spacemacs) and enjoying it...i have been corrupted
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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 21
syntactically or expressivity wise (amount of code needed to express an idea)
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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 21
And again, as a testing expert you (and similarly other PL people with different verification expertise) might be well suited to do this work.

Regardless, I'm broadly of the opinion that researchers should do what they want and not be pulled by things that don't excite them.
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notypes.bsky.social
Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 21
I think the challenge is demonstrating to people that they even *should* use these systems (instead of taking the path of least resistance which is asking thr LLM to generate the tests for you)
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notypes.bsky.social
Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 21
- a majority of LLM / Agentic systems work is being done outside the community
- formal reasoning with AI people have been ahead of the curve so that's one place we've been doing well
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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 21
- Bug data systems (spark, map-reduce were not PL conf papers)
- ML (TVM, PyTorch published at OSDI, ASPLOS)
- Cloud systems (hydro is at VLDB)
- High-performance design (HW design, image processing etc. came from outside the community)
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notypes.bsky.social
Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 21
This is an interesting thread because my perspective on your work is that it's precisely the kind of thing we need to make LLM-assisted code generation better *now*.

Some folks in formal methods already realize this but: when code is cheap to generate, verification becomes the primary problem
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notypes.bsky.social
Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 21
I would say the benefit of academia is the ability to take long-term bets instead of waiting for things to take their proper course.

PL historically has been late to the party on many different trends; it takes 2-3 years to really get a grasp on the ideas in a new area and contribute back
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notypes.bsky.social
Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 19
You can reasonably argue whether a class on C programming (or build systems, tooling, validating programs, etc.) would be useful or not but it is a materially different curricular goal from what a required, sophomore-level systems courses do (and I would argue, should do)
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notypes.bsky.social
Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 19
As @shriram.bsky.social always points out, it's more important to look at what the goals of the curriculum is instead of the specific language it uses.

The goals of most these classes is to teach students systems abstractions (which might include C but touch ISA, circuits, OS abstractions) ... 1/2
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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 17
Switching to OCaml really makes me appreciate how much effort Rust folks put into good error messages
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Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 16
I don't think of "manufacturer prowess" (compilation is not novel-y hard, it is a lot of engineering).

Mobile definitely laid the groundwork
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notypes.bsky.social
Rachit Nigam @notypes.bsky.social · Jan 16
I don't have strong evidence to think so. For example, RISC-V has been in development for quite some time but compiler support is not super strong.

Said differently: this remains a function of consumer demand and compiler engineering remains slow
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