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,
Kathryn S. McKinley
Editor
|
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 |
Selected Papers by Year
1979
Code Generation in a Machine-Independent Compiler
by Roderic G. G. Cattell, Joseph M. Newcomer, and Bruce W. Leverett
1979
Efficient Computation of LALR(1) Look-Ahead Sets
by Frank DeRemer and Thomas J. Pennello
1979
Automatic Storage Optimization
by Janet Fabri
1982
An Overview of the PL.8 Compiler
by Marc Auslander and Martin Hopkins
1982
gprof: A Call Graph Execution Profiler
by Susan L. Graham, Peter B. Kessler, and Marshall K. Mckusick
1982
Optimization of Range Checking
by Victoria Markestein, John Cocke, and Peter Markstein
1982
Register Allocation and Spilling via Graph Coloring
by Gregory J. Chaitin
1984
Automatic Loop Interchange
by John R. Allen and Ken Kennedy
1984
Register Allocation by Priority-based Coloring
by Frederick Chow and John Hennesey
1984
Automatic Generation of Peephole Optimizations
by Jack W. Davidson and Christopher W. Fraser
1984
Parallel Processing: A Smart Compiler and a Dumb Machine
by Joseph A. Fisher, John R. Ellis, John C. Ruttenburg, and Alexandru Nicolau
1986
Interprocedural Dependence Analysis and Parallelization
by Michael Burke and Ron Cytron
1986
Interprocedural Constant Propagation
by David Callahan, Keith D. Cooper, Ken Kennedy, and Linda
Torczon
1986
Efficient Instruction Scheduling for a Pipelined Architecture
by Philip B. Gibbons and Steven S. Muchnick
1986
ORBIT: An Optimizing Compiler for Scheme
by David Kranz, Richard Kelsey, Jonathan Rees, Paul Hudak,
James Philbin, and Norman Adams
1986
Global Register Allocation at Link Time
by David W. Wall
1988
Real-time Concurrent Collection on Stock Multiprocessors
by Andrew W. Appel, John R. Ellis, and Kai Li
1988
Interprocedural Side-Effect Analysis in Linear Time
by Keith D. Cooper and Ken Kennedy
1988
Interprocedural Slicing Using Dependence Graphs
by Susan Horwitz, Thomas Reps, and David Binkley
1988
Software Pipelining: An Effective Scheduling Technique for VLIW Machines
by Monica Lam
1988
Control Flow Analysis in Scheme
by Olin Shivers
1988
Register Windows vs. Register Allocation
by David W. Wall
1989
Coloring Heuristics for Register Allocation
by Preston Briggs, Keith D. Cooper, Ken Kennedy, and Linda Torczon
1989
Customization: Optimizing Compiler Technology for SELF, A Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Programming Language
by Craig Chambers and David Ungar
1989
On-The-Fly Detection of Access Anomalies
by Edith Schonberg
1990
Improving Register Allocation for Subscripted Variables
by David Callahan, Steve Carr, and Ken Kennedy
1990
Analysis of Pointers and Structures
by David R. Chase, Mark Wegman, and F. Kenneth Zadeck
1990
How to Read Floating-Point Numbers Accurately
by William D. Clinger
1990
How to Print Floating-Point Numbers Accurately
by Guy L. Steele Jr., and Jon L. White
1990
Fast Breakpoints: Design and Implementation
by Peter B. Kessler
1990
Profile Guided Code Positioning
by Karl Pettis and Robert C. Hansen
1991
Soft Typing
by Robert Cartwright and Mike Fagan
1991
Predicting Program Behavior Using Real or Estimated Profiles
by David W. Wall
1991
A Data Locality Optimizing Algorithm
by Michael E. Wolf and Monica Lam
1992
Lazy Code Motion
by Jens Knoop, Oliver Ruthing, and Bernhard Steffen
1992
A Safe Approximate Algorithm for Interprocedural Pointer Aliasing
by William Landi and Barbara G. Ryder
1993
Space Efficient Conservative Garbage Collection
by Hans-Juergen Boehm
1993
The Essence of Compiling with Continuations
by Cormac Flanagan, Amr Sabry, Bruce F. Duba, and Matthias Felleisen
1993
Balanced Scheduling: Instruction Scheduling When Memory Latency is Uncertain
by Daniel R. Kerns and Susan J. Eggers
1994
ATOM: A System for Building Customized Program Analysis Tools
by Amitabh Srivastava and Alan Eustace
1996
Optimizing ML with Run-Time Code Generation
by Peter Lee and Mark Leone
1996
TIL: A Type-Directed Optimizing Compiler for ML
by David Tarditi, Greg Morrisett, Perry Cheng, Chris Stone,
Robert Harper, and Peter Lee
1998
Improving Data-flow Analysis with Path Profiling
by Glenn Ammons and James R. Larus
1998
Thin Locks: Featherweight Synchronization for Java
by David F. Bacon, Ravi Konuru, Chet Murthy, and Mauricio
Serrano
1998
Complete Removal of Redundant Computations
by Rastislav Bodik, Rajiv Gupta, and Mary Lou Soffa
1998
The Design and Implementation of a Certifying Compiler
by George C. Necula, and Peter Lee
1999
On Bounding Time and Space for Multiprocessor Garbage Collection
by Guy E. Blelloch and Perry Cheng
1999
A Fast Fourier Transform Compiler
by Matteo Frigo
1999
An Evaluation of Staged Run-Time Optimizations in DyC
by Brian Grant, Matthai Philipose, Markus Mock, Craig
Chambers, and Susan J. Eggers