20 Years of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation 1979-1999: A Selection, (the papers and retrospectives are in the ACM Digital Library), Edited by K. S. McKinley, SIGNOTICES 39(4), April 2004. This webpage.
Introduction
It is my pleasure to introduce this special volume of selected papers from the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) and its logical predecessor, the Symposium on Compiler Construction. This conference series is the premier forum for original work on practical issues in the design, development, implementation, and use of programming languages. At the appointment of the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN), a committee of past program chairs, general chairs, and program committee members selected 50 papers published in PLDI from 1979 through 1999. Our committee used impact and technical excellence as the primary selection criteria.
We included with the original papers retrospectives from the original authors (in all but two cases). The authors discuss the history of the work, and how the paper influenced their own, and other subsequent work. We are very grateful to the authors who wrote interesting technical and personal retrospectives that help to put the work in a broader context. We hope this project will have many positive effects. The collection will highlight and honor papers that made a large impact on the field. We hope academics and practitioners will use it as a reading list for training and that beginning graduate students will use it to study for area exams. We also hope our selection will serve to reemphasize early papers that may no longer be getting the attention (and citations!) they deserve.
We began by soliciting nominations from the committee and community at large. At least three committee members carefully reviewed all the papers in each year. We received 351 nominations from the community and the committee, resulting in the nomination of 174 distinct papers. Each committee member then voted for 60 of these 174. Excluding the top 29 papers, we voted again with 15 votes among the additional 45 papers that had garnered at least one vote in the previous round. We then held a conference call and discussed the final selection of all papers. We discussed conflict papers at the end of the selection process, and the person with a conflict hung up and called back upon email notification. Of the 50 papers, 16 papers include one or more committee members as authors.
I would like to thank the committee for their outstanding efforts to
assemble the best possible selection by reading through all the
proceedings and thoughtfully examining the work of their colleagues. I
would especially like to thank Guy Steele and Keith Cooper, who
closely examined all of the proceedings and thus provided two complete
sets of nominations from the entire collection. Thanks also to the
wider community for their thoughtful nominations. The committee and
community nominators appear on the next page.
I am very thankful to Gem Naivar who coordinated the retrospective process and the assembly of this volume. I am grateful to Jim Burrill and Bill Yoder for assembling the web pages, and writing scripts that made this process go smoothly. I would also like to thank Mark Mandelbaum and Roxanne Carcaterra at ACM headquarters who helped to stock the ACM digital libraries with the proceedings we needed. A special thanks to David Presberg who donated his entire collection of SIGPLAN proceedings and NOTICES, which expanded ACMs incomplete SIGPLAN archives. Our committee was thus able to access all the proceedings and papers from 1979 to 1999 using the ACM digital library, which made our work much more manageable. A final thank you to Jay Fenwick for assembling the proceedings from the digital library.
A special thank you to Scotty Strahan who created the original artwork using oil paint, acid-free paper, glue, and ink on canvas that we reproduced for the cover.
Enjoy,
Selected Papers by Year
1979
1979
1979
1982
1982
1982
1982
1984
1984
1984
1984
1986
1986
1986
1986
1986
1988
1988
1988
1988
1988
1988
1989
1989
1989
1990
1990
1990
1990
1990
1990
1991
1991
1991
1992
1992
1993
1993
1993
1994
1996
1996
1998
1998
1998
1998
1999
1999
1999
Kathryn S. McKinley
Editor
Organizing Committee
Kathryn S. McKinley
The University of Texas at Austin
Program Committee
Keith D. Cooper,
Rice University
Jack W. Davidson,
The University of Virginia
Susan Eggers,
The University of Washington, Seattle
Charles N. Fischer,
The University of Wisconsin, Madison
Ken Kennedy,
Rice University
Jim Larus,
Microsoft Research
Peter Lee,
Carnegie Mellon University
Barbara Ryder,
Rutgers University
Michael D. Smith,
Harvard University
Mary Lou Soffa,
The University of Pittsburgh
Guy Steele, Sun Microsystems
Philip Wadler,
Avaya Labs
Mark Wegman,
IBM Research
Code Generation in a Machine-Independent Compiler
by Roderic G. G. Cattell, Joseph M. Newcomer, and Bruce W. Leverett
Efficient Computation of LALR(1) Look-Ahead Sets
by Frank DeRemer and Thomas J. Pennello
Automatic Storage Optimization
by Janet Fabri
An Overview of the PL.8 Compiler
by Marc Auslander and Martin Hopkins
gprof: A Call Graph Execution Profiler
by Susan L. Graham, Peter B. Kessler, and Marshall K. Mckusick
Optimization of Range Checking
by Victoria Markestein, John Cocke, and Peter Markstein
Register Allocation and Spilling via Graph Coloring
by Gregory J. Chaitin
Automatic Loop Interchange
by John R. Allen and Ken Kennedy
Register Allocation by Priority-based Coloring
by Frederick Chow and John Hennesey
Automatic Generation of Peephole Optimizations
by Jack W. Davidson and Christopher W. Fraser
Parallel Processing: A Smart Compiler and a Dumb Machine
by Joseph A. Fisher, John R. Ellis, John C. Ruttenburg, and Alexandru Nicolau
Interprocedural Dependence Analysis and Parallelization
by Michael Burke and Ron Cytron
Interprocedural Constant Propagation
by David Callahan, Keith D. Cooper, Ken Kennedy, and Linda
Torczon
Efficient Instruction Scheduling for a Pipelined Architecture
by Philip B. Gibbons and Steven S. Muchnick
ORBIT: An Optimizing Compiler for Scheme
by David Kranz, Richard Kelsey, Jonathan Rees, Paul Hudak,
James Philbin, and Norman Adams
Global Register Allocation at Link Time
by David W. Wall
Real-time Concurrent Collection on Stock Multiprocessors
by Andrew W. Appel, John R. Ellis, and Kai Li
Interprocedural Side-Effect Analysis in Linear Time
by Keith D. Cooper and Ken Kennedy
Interprocedural Slicing Using Dependence Graphs
by Susan Horwitz, Thomas Reps, and David Binkley
Software Pipelining: An Effective Scheduling Technique for VLIW Machines
by Monica Lam
Control Flow Analysis in Scheme
by Olin Shivers
Register Windows vs. Register Allocation
by David W. Wall
Coloring Heuristics for Register Allocation
by Preston Briggs, Keith D. Cooper, Ken Kennedy, and Linda Torczon
Customization: Optimizing Compiler Technology for SELF, A Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Programming Language
by Craig Chambers and David Ungar
On-The-Fly Detection of Access Anomalies
by Edith Schonberg
Improving Register Allocation for Subscripted Variables
by David Callahan, Steve Carr, and Ken Kennedy
Analysis of Pointers and Structures
by David R. Chase, Mark Wegman, and F. Kenneth Zadeck
How to Read Floating-Point Numbers Accurately
by William D. Clinger
How to Print Floating-Point Numbers Accurately
by Guy L. Steele Jr., and Jon L. White
Fast Breakpoints: Design and Implementation
by Peter B. Kessler
Profile Guided Code Positioning
by Karl Pettis and Robert C. Hansen
Soft Typing
by Robert Cartwright and Mike Fagan
Predicting Program Behavior Using Real or Estimated Profiles
by David W. Wall
A Data Locality Optimizing Algorithm
by Michael E. Wolf and Monica Lam
Lazy Code Motion
by Jens Knoop, Oliver Ruthing, and Bernhard Steffen
A Safe Approximate Algorithm for Interprocedural Pointer Aliasing
by William Landi and Barbara G. Ryder
Space Efficient Conservative Garbage Collection
by Hans-Juergen Boehm
The Essence of Compiling with Continuations
by Cormac Flanagan, Amr Sabry, Bruce F. Duba, and Matthias Felleisen
Balanced Scheduling: Instruction Scheduling When Memory Latency is Uncertain
by Daniel R. Kerns and Susan J. Eggers
ATOM: A System for Building Customized Program Analysis Tools
by Amitabh Srivastava and Alan Eustace
Optimizing ML with Run-Time Code Generation
by Peter Lee and Mark Leone
TIL: A Type-Directed Optimizing Compiler for ML
by David Tarditi, Greg Morrisett, Perry Cheng, Chris Stone,
Robert Harper, and Peter Lee
Improving Data-flow Analysis with Path Profiling
by Glenn Ammons and James R. Larus
Thin Locks: Featherweight Synchronization for Java
by David F. Bacon, Ravi Konuru, Chet Murthy, and Mauricio
Serrano
Complete Removal of Redundant Computations
by Rastislav Bodik, Rajiv Gupta, and Mary Lou Soffa
The Design and Implementation of a Certifying Compiler
by George C. Necula, and Peter Lee
On Bounding Time and Space for Multiprocessor Garbage Collection
by Guy E. Blelloch and Perry Cheng
A Fast Fourier Transform Compiler
by Matteo Frigo
An Evaluation of Staged Run-Time Optimizations in DyC
by Brian Grant, Matthai Philipose, Markus Mock, Craig
Chambers, and Susan J. Eggers