Patrick Lam

Associate Professor, University of Waterloo

2025-06-27
Some moderate sized snowbanks in uptown Waterloo
2025-06-26

@koronkebitch I failed some midterms in undergrad!

2025-06-26

@wollman so was the other 8/10!

2025-06-26

@regehr tied high score!

2025-06-26

@dongkwan welcome to mastodon! you'll find interesting people on the "live feeds" of this server.

2025-06-26

High score, by a not-PL researcher: 8/10
Low score: 4/10
Many people get 6/10.

(The quiz doesn't track anything; it's purely client-side).

2025-06-26

I was talking to someone at PLDI and the topic of novelty came up.

Here's a quiz! It randomly picks papers from PLDI 2014 and PLDI 2024. Can you tell which year each paper appeared in?

patricklam.ca/pldi-quiz/

Tagging @regehr, who had something to do with the PLDI 2024 program...

2025-06-18

@markusde good presentation!

2025-06-18

Oh I see @markusde on stage!

2025-06-18

This morning session seems kind of like the "actually compiler optimizations don't help that much" with the "being sane about UBs isn't really that expensive" (Popescu and Lopes) and the current "what does alias analysis really do for perf?" (Weber, Theodoridis, Su) talk.

2025-06-18

Who's at #PLDI?

2025-06-17

Where to next for static race detection? It is really good at verifying lock based patterns now, but that's not enough for verifying real-world programs, which use all sorts of interesting idioms to avoid races (and hence undefined behaviour!)

On Friday afternoon Karoliine Holter is presenting our TOPLAS paper at #PLDI: "Sound Static Data Race Verification for C: Is the Race Lost?" Joint work with my colleagues from Tartu: Karoliine, Simmo Saan, and Vesal Vojdani.

We identified 20 coding idioms to avoid races by separating accesses in time and space; some existing tool can verify 8 of the 20. If you want to verify real world programs you'd better be able to handle these idioms: we show that they do occur in real programs from the Concrat suite.

PDF: patricklam.ca/papers/25.toplas

2025-04-28

Hello! Anyone happen to be in Ottawa on Monday? #icse2025

2024-11-17

Going through my pictures from SPLASH, I noticed this lawn sign about a ballot initiative. Yes on PL indeed!

A lawn sign with a library, books, and main text "YESonPL", subtitled with "Save Pasadena's Library". Also a lawn sign for the re-election of Tina Wu Fredericks to the Pasadena Unified School Board.
2024-10-25

Collaborator meetup!

Two computer scientists take a selfie at a conference.
2024-10-25

Karoliine presenting our work at the conference yesterday!

A person at a podium making an explanatory gesture, with the title slide ("Abstract Debuggers: Exploring Program Behaviors using Static Analysis Results") being projected behind.
2024-10-07

From Benoit Baudry's keynote at #VISSOFT/#SCAM, about teaching a computational art course: "you can write code for banks and missiles, or you can write code for art."

2024-09-05

@dan it doesn't look completely western, a bit more hybrid, but not clearly Japanese.

2024-09-05

@dan You'd think Europe, except for the menu.

2024-09-04

Hey, I should point out that there is a demo video of the GobPie implementation, by Karoliine:

youtu.be/KtLFdxMAdD8

This demo is going to be presented at the Future of Debugging Workshop in Vienna shortly.

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