Brazilian Conference on Software: Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages, by Dalvan Griebler

PUC-PR hosted CBSoft 2024 from September 30 to October 4, and I had the opportunity to organize the SBLP - Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages. What an incredible experience!

Professor Saman Amarasinghe (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) delivered a content-rich lecture, sharing valuable knowledge! He pointed out several gaps and challenges in the field of compilers and programming languages, particularly highlighting the opportunities that exist in working with array abstraction and innovative techniques for optimizing these structures. He demonstrated that it is possible to significantly improve performance. This abstraction is quite common in various applications such as artificial intelligence, fluid dynamics simulation, social networks, and recommendation systems.

The event included a tutorial on the development and use of the formal specification language Quint, taught by lead developer Gabriela Moreira. Quint is an executable, simple, and user-friendly specification language that transpiles/generates to the TLA+ simulator.

Several papers were presented during the event by Brazilian researchers from different Brazilian universities. In addition to graduate and undergraduate students, research professors such as Roberto Ierusalimschy (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, creator of the Lua language), Fernando Magno Quintão Pereira (Federal University of Minas Gerais), Samuel Feitosa (UFFS - Federal University of Southern Frontier), André Rauber Du Bois (Federal University of Pelotas), Francisco Heron de Carvalho Junior (Federal University of Ceará (UFC), Hugo Musso Gualandi (UFRJ - Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), Paulo Borba (Federal University of Pernambuco), and Adolfo Neto (UTFPR) were also present.

Congratulations to the authors of the best papers, who were recognized for their valuable contributions to the advancement of the field:

1st Place

Hok: Higher-Order GPU kernels in Elixir
Authors: Tiago Perlin, Frederico Peixoto Antunes, Gerson Geraldo H. Cavalheiro, Andre Rauber Du Bois (Federal University of Pelotas)

// In this blog post you can see the video of this presentation

2nd Place

OFG-STM: Transactional Memory for GPUs based on Obstruction-Free STM algorithms
Authors: Tiago Perlin, Gerson Geraldo H. Cavalheiro, Andre Rauber Du Bois (Federal University of Pelotas)

3rd Place (two papers tied)

An internal domain-specific language for expressing linear pipelines: a proof-of-concept with MPI in Rust
Authors: Leonardo Gibrowski Faé, Dalvan Griebler (PUCRS - Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul)
Memoization of Mutable Objects
Authors: Caio Raposo, Fernando Magno Quintão Pereira (Federal University of Minas Gerais)

All the papers have been published and are available for reading