About

Programming languages are the interface between people and the machines that carry out computation on their behalf. As such, programming languages are fundemantal tools of computing science.

Therefore, we believe that existing languages should be studied deeply, to understand their applications, design process, and their impact on both the programming ecosystem, as well as the programmers’ way of thinking.

Armed with this knowledge we strive to improve programming languages and develop their ecosystems to be efficient at their tasks, ergonomic, and well-suited to their domains.

We do this using a multi-faceted approach incorporating elements of design, mathematics, experimental science, and engineering.

We focus our efforts on JavaScript and R, dynamic languages used ubiquitously in their respective fields of web programming and data science, whose performance affects millions of users. We also have an interest in new and up-comming languages like Julia, which can become stars in their fields and make areas of computing faster and easier.

Join the lab

If you are interested in programming languages and would like to try your hand at programming language research, we encourage you to contact us at ck@cs.uni-salzburg.at or j.vitek@neu.edu.

We are constantly looking for smart and enthusiastic people, and may have openings for Bachelor, Master, PhD students, and Post-Doc researchers.

You can find more details regarding interesting project ideas here, or let us know if you have a PL project you would like to work on.

News

January 2024

Christoph Kirsch has become responsible for Scalable Symbolic Execution through Bounded Model Checking in RA12 Scalable formal methods in robotics and production that is part of WP1 of the ROBOPROX project

October 2023

Jan Vitek has received an ERC grant Proof-of-Concept, R4R

January 2023

Pierre Donat- Bouillud has received a two-year fellowhip in OPJAK MSCA FELLOWSHIPS CZ program.

November 2022

Jan Vitek has received a grant for the RiGiD project within the prestigious EXPRO projects announced by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic.

October 2022

Christoph Kirsch has become the Head of the Programming Research Laboratory.

October 2022

An application for Symbolic Execution of 64-bit RISC-V Machine Code with Eager Path Merging registration has been filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

September 2022

An application for Symbolic Execution in Testing Software registration has been filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

March 2021

Pierre Donat-Bouillud is awarded the Seal of Excellence for its MSCA Fellowship proposal: DataBugs: Finding Bugs in Data Science Codes

April 2019

Jan Vitek, Ryan Culpepper, Petr Maj, Konrad Siek, Guido Chari, and Lucie Lerch co-organize ETAPS 2019.

November 2018
November 2018

Jan Vitek, Filip Křikava, Paley Li, and Konrad Siek co-organize SPLASH 2018.

July 2018

Flexible Alias Protection, a paper by James Noble, Jan Vitek, and John Potter receives the 2018 AITO Test of Time award at ECOOP.

July 2018
July 2018

Julia Belyakova co-organizes the ECOOP and ISSTA Doctoral Symposium 2018.

July 2018

Jan Vitek and Filip Křikava co-organize Curry On 2018.

June 2018

Filip Křikava co-organizes the 11th Transformation Tool Contest (part of STAF 2018).

November 2017

Deja-vu: A Map of Code Duplicates on GitHub is covered by news publications around the world, including: The Morning Paper, Slashdot, The Register, Developpez, OpenNet, Toutiao, and Sohu.

July 2017

Filip Křikava co-organizes the 10th Transformation Tool Contest (part of STAF 2017).

June 2017

Jan Vitek and Filip Křikava co-organized Curry On 2017.

April 2017

Julia Belyakova and Artem Pelenitsyn co-organized the 1st Russian Conference on Programming Languages and Compilers.

July 2017

Jan Vitek joins Bioconductor Advisory Board.

May 2017

We organize the Programming Language Implementation Summer School 2017 in Bertinoro, Italy.

December 2016

Tomáš Kalibera joins R core team.

November 2016

Tomáš Kalibera joins R foundation.