PLDI 2026
Basics
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Dates | – |
| Venue | Limelight Boulder, Boulder, Colorado |
| Host | ACM SIGPLAN |
| URL | pldi26.sigplan.org |
| Format | Multi-track with co-located events, workshops, tutorials |
| Framing | PL research, compilers, verification; PAgE workshop on agentic engineering |
Co-located conferences
- ISMM 2026 — International Symposium on Memory Management
- LCTES 2026 — Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems
Workshops
| Workshop | Full name | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ARRAY 2026 | Array-oriented Programming | |
| CP 2026 | Choreographic Programming | |
| EGRAPHS | Equality Graphs | E-graph rewriting, optimization |
| PAgE 2026 | Principles of Agentic Engineering | Formal foundations for agent safety/reliability |
| PLMW | PL Mentoring Workshop | |
| PROPL | Programming for the Planet | |
| SOAP 2026 | State of the Art in Program Analysis | |
| — | Tom Ball at Sixty | Celebration session |
Tutorials
- Writing Performance-Portable Kernels Simplified with Helion
- A guided tour through Oxidized OCaml
- Implementing an Integrated Development Environment
- Mechanized Specifications for Real-World Programming Languages
- ACT: End-to-End Compiler Infrastructure for Emerging AI Accelerators
- Deep dive into the AWS Nitro Isolation Engine
PAgE 2026 — Principles of Agentic Engineering
The workshop most directly connected to current research.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Date | |
| Deadline | 2026-05-06 AoE |
| Portal | page2026.hotcrp.com |
| Contact | sbarke@microsoft.com |
Organizing committee
- Shraddha Barke (Microsoft Research, Redmond)
- Peli de Halleux (Microsoft Research)
- Dan Grossman (University of Washington)
- Madan Musuvathi (Microsoft Research)
- Dawn Song (UC Berkeley)
- Ben Zorn (Microsoft)
Submission tracks
- Archived papers (up to 10 pages) — published in ACM Digital Library
- Non-archival submissions (up to 6 pages) — work in progress, position papers, demos
Why PAgE matters
"AI-powered agents increasingly deployed in production settings require formal foundations for safety and reliability through agentic engineering principles."
This is the PL community's formal-methods entry point into agent governance — the same territory BugBash approaches from the testing/DST side and ELS approaches from the Lisp/MOP side. The committee (Grossman, Song, Zorn) carries enough weight to set vocabulary that sticks.
Why
PLDI sits at the intersection of formal methods and practical compiler engineering. Three reasons this year matters:
- PAgE workshop. First SIGPLAN-affiliated venue explicitly framed as "agentic engineering." The formal-methods community claiming this term has downstream consequences for how agent governance gets specified. The elenctic-spec framing and Seven Concerns layering should be testable against whatever vocabulary PAgE settles on.
- Nitro Isolation Engine tutorial. AWS Nitro is the production hypervisor-isolation analog to Antithesis. The tutorial is a data point on how far hardware-backed isolation has moved since BugBash.
- Egraphs workshop. E-graph rewriting is the optimization substrate beneath equality saturation. Relevant to any spec-refinement system that needs to normalize equivalent representations — the same problem elenctic-spec faces at the methodology layer.
Refutation
The PAgE framing for this event is wrong if:
- The workshop is dominated by LLM-agent benchmarking rather than formal foundations (safety/reliability becomes eval leaderboards).
- The "agentic engineering" vocabulary diverges completely from the Seven Concerns framing, with no productive mapping between them.
- The Nitro tutorial is marketing rather than technical substrate.
In those cases PLDI reduces to a compiler conference with an adjacent agent workshop that didn't converge on useful primitives.
Concern mapping
| Event/Talk | Concern | Claim under test |
|---|---|---|
| PAgE workshop (overall) | L3, L7 | PL community can formalize agent governance primitives |
| Grossman/Song/Zorn committee | L3 | Formal methods vocabulary for agents will be PL-native |
| Nitro Isolation Engine | L1, L5 | Hardware isolation composes with agent sandboxing |
| Egraphs workshop | L2, L3 | Equality saturation applies to spec normalization |
| Mechanized Specifications | L3 | Mechanized specs are the reader-as-spec-emitter generalized |
| Oxidized OCaml tutorial | L1, L2 | Rust ownership model transfers to ML family |
Related
- BugBash 2026 — Antithesis, DST, software correctness; the testing-side complement to PAgE's formal-methods framing
- ELS 2026 — European Lisp Symposium; MOP and reader-as-protocol are the Lisp-side complement
- TLA+ System Design — formal specification practice, directly relevant to PAgE submissions
- Agentic Systems 2026 — Seven Concerns framework that PAgE vocabulary should map to
- Elenctic Vibe Code Review — the review discipline PAgE might formalize
- Lean4 on FreeBSD — theorem proving toolchain, mechanized specification substrate
- Agent Isolation with FreeBSD Jails — local isolation counterpart to Nitro tutorial