A concrete and formal definition of memory safety from (inter alia) Benjamin C. Pierce.

We give a rigorous characterization of what it means for a programming language to be memory safe, capturing the intuition that memory safety supports local reasoning about state.

Paper in the proceedings of the Principles of Security and Trust conference 2018.

Development of incremental improvements to a pure-functional quicksort implementation, eliminating multiple passes over the input and unnecessary append operations by introducing accumulators.

The OOPSLA 1997 paper that introduced Squeak, a Smalltalk implementation “written in itself”:

Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks.

The paper discusses the bootstrapping process, the VM’s object format and garbage collector, the Smalltalk-subset-to-C translation process, the implementations’ approach to the BitBlt graphics primitive, performance, and the fledgling Squeak community. The latter is still going strong thirty-some years later.

A collection of 100 impossibility results and some discussion of commonalities and differences among them:

This talk is about impossibility results in the area of distributed computing. In this category, I include not just results that say that a particular task cannot be accomplished, but also lower bound results, which say that a task cannot be accomplished within a certain bound on cost.

You may ask yourself why impossibility proofs are important: my answer is that if you don’t know what’s impossible, you run the risk of wasting a lot of time trying to achieve the unachievable!