SIGPLAN


SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on programming languages. This SIG explores programming language concepts and tools, focusing on design, implementation, practice, and theory. Its members are programming language developers, educators, implementers, researchers, theoreticians, and users.

Conferences

Programming Languages Achievement Award

Recognizes an individual or individuals who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the field of programming languages.
Recognizes outstanding contributions by young researchers in the area of programming languages. The award is named after the computer scientist Robin Milner.
  • 2025: Isil Dillig
  • 2024: Armando Solar-Lezama
  • 2023: Nate Foster
  • 2022: Viktor Vafeiadis
  • 2021: Emina Torlak
  • 2020: Eran Yahav
  • 2019: Martin Vechev
  • 2018: Ranjit Jhala
  • 2017: Derek Dreyer
  • 2016: Stephanie Weirich
  • 2015: David Walker
  • 2014: Sumit Gulwani
  • 2013: Lars Birkedal
  • 2012: Shriram Krishnamurthi

    Programming Languages Software Award

Given to an institution or individual to recognize the development of a software system that has had a significant impact on programming language research, implementations, and tools.
  • 2025: Lean awarded to Gabriel Ebner, Soonho Kong, Leo de Moura and Sebastian Ullrich.
  • 2024: Rust awarded to Aaron Turon, Alex Crichton, Brian Anderson, Dave Herman, Felix S. Klock II, Graydon Hoare, Marijn Haverbeke, Nicholas D. Matsakis, Patrick Walton, Tim Chevalier, Yehuda Katz, and All Rust Contributors Past and Present
  • 2023: OCaml awarded to David Allsopp, Florian Angeletti, Stephen Dolan, Damien Doligez, Alain Fritsch, Jacques Garrigue, Xavier Leroy, Anil Madhavapeddy, Luc Maranget, Nicolás Ojeda Bär, Gabriel Scherer, KC Sivaramakrishnan, Jérôme Vouillon, and Léo White
  • 2022: CompCert awarded to Xavier Leroy, Sandrine Blazy, Zaynah Dargaye, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Michael Schmidt, Bernhard Schommer, and Jean-Baptiste Tristan
  • 2021: WebAssembly awarded to Andreas Rossberg, Derek Schuff, Bradley Nelson, JF Bastien, and Ben L. Titzer
  • 2020: Pin awarded to Artur Klauser, Greg Lueck, Mark Charney, Gail Lyons, Geoff Lowney, Aamer Jaleel, Harish Patil, Vijay Janapa Reddi, Kim Hazelwood, S. Bharadwaj Yadavalli, Ramesh Peri, Elena Demikhovsky, Ady Tal, Moshe Bach, Alex Skaletsky, CK Luk, Steven Wallace, Tevi Devor, Robert Muth, and Nadav Chachmon
  • 2019: Scala awarded to Martin Odersky, Adriaan Moors, Aleksandar Prokopec, Heather Miller, Iulian Dragos, Nada Amin, Philipp Haller, Sébastien Doeraene, and Tiark Rompf
  • 2018: Racket awarded to Eli Barzilay, Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Jay McCarthy, and Sam Tobin-Hochstadt
  • 2016: V8
  • 2015: Z3 Theorem Prover
  • 2014: GNU Compiler Collection
  • 2013: Rocq proof assistant
  • 2012: Jikes Research Virtual Machine awarded to Bowen Alpern, Matthew Arnold, Clement Attanasio, John Barton, Steve Blackburn, Maria Butrico, Perry Cheng, Tony Cocchi, Julian Dolby, Peter Donald, Steven Fink, Daniel Frampton, Robin Garner, David Grove, Michael Hind, Derek Lieber, Kathryn McKinley, Mark Mergen, Eliot Moss, Ton Ngo, Igor Peshansky, Filip Pizlo, Feng Qian, Ian Rogers, Vivek Sarkar, Mauricio Serrano, Janice Shepherd, Stephen Smith, Peter F. Sweeney, Martin Trapp, Kris Venstermans, and John Whaley
  • 2011: Glasgow Haskell Compiler awarded to Simon Peyton Jones, and Simon Marlow
  • 2010: LLVM awarded to Chris Lattner

    SIGPLAN Doctoral Dissertation Award

The full name of this award is the John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award, after the computer scientist John C. Reynolds. It is "presented annually to the author of the outstanding doctoral dissertation in the area of Programming Languages."
  • 2025: Harrison Goldstein and Rachit Nigam
  • 2024: Benjamin Bichsel
  • 2023: Sam Westrick
  • 2022: Jay P. Lim, Rutgers and Uri Alon
  • 2021: Gagandeep Singh and Ralf Jung
  • 2020: Filip Niksic
  • 2019: Ryan Beckett
  • 2018: Justin Hsu and David Menendez
  • 2017: Ramana Kumar
  • 2016: Shachar Itzhaky and Vilhelm Sjöberg
  • 2015: Mark Batty
  • 2014: Aaron Turon
  • 2013: Patrick Rondon
  • 2012: Dan Marino
  • 2010: Robert L. Bocchino
  • 2009: Akash Lai and William Thies
  • 2008: Michael Bond and Viktor Vafeiadis
  • 2007: Swarat Chaudhuri
  • 2006: Xiangyu Zhang
  • 2005: Sumit Gulwani
  • 2003: Godmar Back
  • 2002: Michael Hicks
  • 2001: Rastislav Bodik

    SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award

  • 2024: Emery Berger
  • 2023: Talia Ringer
  • 2022: Mike Hicks
  • 2021: Ben Zorn
  • 2019: Jan Vitek
  • 2018: Zena Ariola
  • 2016: Phil Wadler
  • 2015: Dan Grossman
  • 2014: Simon Peyton Jones
  • 2013: Kathleen Fisher
  • 2012: Jens Palsberg
  • 2011: Kathryn S. McKinley
  • 2010: Jack W. Davidson
  • 2009: Mamdouh Ibrahim
  • 2008: Michael Burke
  • 2007: Linda M. Northrop
  • 2006: Hans Boehm
  • 2005: no award made
  • 2004: Ron Cytron
  • 2003: Mary Lou Soffa
  • 2002: Andrew Appel
  • 2001: Barbara G. Ryder
  • 2000: David Wise
  • 1999: Loren Meissner
  • 1998: Brent Hailpern
  • 1997: J.A.N. Lee and Jean E. Sammet
  • 1996: Dick Wexelblat and John Richards

    Most Influential PLDI Paper Award

Given to the authors of a paper presented at PLDI 10 years prior to the award year, in recognition of its influence over the past decade.
  • 2025 : A Simpler, Safer Programming and Execution Model for Intermittent Systems by Brandon Lucia and Benjamin Ransford
  • 2024 : FlowDroid: Precise Context, Flow, Field, Object-sensitive and Lifecycle-aware Taint Analysis for Android Apps by Steven Arzt, Siegfried Rasthofer, Christian Fritz, Eric Bodden, Alexandre Bartel, Jacques Klein, Yves Le Traon, Damien Octeau, Patrick McDaniel
  • 2023 : Halide: A Language and Compiler for Optimizing Parallelism, Locality, and Representation in Image Processing Pipelines by Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Connelly Barnes, Andrew Adams, Sylvain Paris, Frédo Durand, and Saman Amarasinghe
  • 2022 : Test-Case Reduction for C Compiler Bugs by John Regehr, Yang Chen, Pascal Cuoq, Eric Eide, Chucky Ellison, Xuejun Yang
  • 2021 : Finding and Understanding Bugs in C Compilers by Xuejun Yang, Yang Chen, Eric Eide, and John Regehr
  • 2020 : Green: A Framework for Supporting Energy-Conscious Programming using Controlled Approximation by Woongki Baek and Trishul M. Chilimbi
  • 2019 : FastTrack: Efficient and Precise Dynamic Race Detection by Cormac Flanagan and Stephen N. Freund
  • 2018 : A Practical Automatic Polyhedral Parallelizer and Locality Optimizer by Uday Bondhugula, Albert Hartono, J. Ramanujam, and P. Sadayappan
  • 2017 : Valgrind: A Framework for Heavyweight Dynamic Binary Instrumentation by Nicholas Nethercote, Julian Seward
  • 2016 : DieHard: Probabilistic Memory Safety for Unsafe Languages by Emery Berger, Benjamin Zorn
  • 2015 : Pin: Building Customized Program Analysis Tools with Dynamic Instrumentation by Chi-Keung Luk, Robert Cohn, Robert Muth, Harish Patil, Artur Klauser, Geoff Lowney, Steven Wallace, Vijay Janapa Reddi, and Kim Hazelwood
  • 2014 : Scalable Lock-Free Dynamic Memory Allocation by Maged M. Michael
  • 2013 : The nesC Language: A Holistic Approach to Networked Embedded Systems by David Gay, Philip Levis, J. Robert von Behren, Matt Welsh, Eric Brewer, and David E. Culler
  • 2012 : Extended Static Checking for Java by Cormac Flanagan, K. Rustan M. Leino, Mark Lillibridge, Greg Nelson, James B. Saxe, and Raymie Stata
  • 2011 : Automatic Predicate Abstraction of C Programs by Thomas Ball, Rupak Majumdar, Todd Millstein, and Sriram K. Rajamani
  • 2010 : Dynamo: A Transparent Dynamic Optimization System by Vasanth Bala, Evelyn Duesterwald, Sanjeev Banerji
  • 2009 : A Fast Fourier Transform Compiler by Matteo Frigo
  • 2008 : The Implementation of the Cilk-5 Multithreaded Language by Matteo Frigo, Charles E. Leiserson, Keith H. Randall
  • 2007 : Exploiting Hardware Performance Counters with Flow and Context Sensitive Profiling by Glenn Ammons, Thomas Ball, and James R. Larus
  • 2006 : TIL: A Type-Directed Optimizing Compiler for ML by David Tarditi, Greg Morrisett, Perry Cheng, Christopher Stone, Robert Harper, and Peter Lee
  • 2005 : Selective Specialization for Object-Oriented Languages by Jeffrey Dean, Craig Chambers, and David Grove
  • 2004 : ATOM: A System for Building Customized Program Analysis Tools by Amitabh Srivastava and Alan Eustace
  • 2003 : Space Efficient Conservative Garbage Collection by Hans Boehm
  • 2002 : Lazy Code Motion by Jens Knoop, Oliver Rüthing, Bernhard Steffen
  • 2001 : A Data Locality Optimizing Algorithm by Michael E. Wolf and Monica S. Lam
  • 2000 : Profile Guided Code Positioning by Karl Pettis and Robert C. Hansen