PLDI

Together with the program committee, it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation -- PLDI'11. This year's conference continues its tradition of being the premier forum for the exchange of ideas on programming languages and their implementations.

This year's conference exhibits the growth of importance of programming language research and practice. We received a record 236 submissions, almost 15% more than last year's previous record. The program committee accepted a record 55 papers, and as a consequence, PLDI'11 will for the first-time have a dual-track program.

These 55 papers were selected after a careful evaluation which involved almost 1000 reviews. Most of these reviews (62%) came from the 31 member Program Committee (PC). The fifty-five member External Review Committee (ERC) contributed with most of the other evaluations. One hundred twelve other reviewers also participated in the evaluation process helping with their expertise in some highly specialized areas. Papers submitted by Program Committee members were evaluated by the External Review Committee and the decision on these papers was made by consensus. The acceptance rate for PC papers was the same as the overall acceptance rate.

Authors were given the opportunity to comment on the first evaluations during the January 15-19 rebuttal period. The identity of the authors was withheld from the reviewers until the evaluations from the PC and ERC were submitted. Unveiling the identity of the authors facilitated the rebuttal process and gave reviewers access to information on impact and research history that would nothave been available otherwise. The Program Committee met on January 29 and 30 in Chicago and made the final decision on each of the submissions except for those authored by PC members. Thanks to the introduction of the dual track schedule which removed constraints in the number of slots, acceptance was based exclusively on the quality of the submissions. No paper was rejected due to lack of space.

In addition to the papers, PLDI'11 also includes several other key program components. New this year is a panel on education organized by Laurie Hendren, in light of the broadening of computer science curricula and the simultaneous broadening reach of programming language research. We also continue two traditions of recent PLDI conferences, a Fun and Interesting Thoughts session for discussing new ideas, and an ACM Student Research Competition. Prior to the conference, a program of five workshops and six tutorials informed our attendees on diverse topics ranging from parallel computing, memory systems, program analysis, security, experimental evaluation and adaptive self tuning.