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Travel notes: PLDI Boulder

A programmer shares daily notes from attending PLDI in Boulder, detailing workshop participation, collaborative coding on Datalog and Knuth-Bendix, meeting researchers, and social activities.

Background

- **PLDI** (Programming Language Design and Implementation) is a top academic conference where researchers present new compiler techniques, type systems, and verification tools. The author works on ZJIT, a just-in-time compiler. - **E-graphs** / **equality saturation** are compiler techniques for representing and exploring many equivalent program rewrites efficiently. **Knuth-Bendix completion** is an algorithm that turns rewrite rules into a canonical system — making equality checking decidable. - **Sea of Nodes** is a compiler IR (used in Java's HotSpot VM) where data dependencies replace control flow. **Alive2** formally verifies LLVM compiler optimizations. **Datalog** is a logic-programming language used in program analysis. - **Linear scan register allocation** assigns CPU registers to program variables; **byte-pair encoding (BPE)** tokenizes text for LLMs and compression. - Many named people (John Regehr, Max Willsey, Ben Titzer, Slava Pestov) are well-known PL/compiler researchers.

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