I'm doing a live Reddit AMA today at 2pm ET! Come ask me about PL, SE, the Master of Software Engineering program I run, Open Access at ACM, my music education startup Noteful, or my silly YouTube video outfits!

www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comme...

I’m convinced that the world would be marginally better if everyone could play on a weekly trivia team.

There’s nothing in the world quite like a coffee shop with free refills. ☕️

Watching Game of Thrones is making me wish for that Mistborn adaptation Brandon Sanderson keeps talking about…

I can’t tell if it’s wonderful or terrible to figure out the reason for your segfault right as the day is ending.

My dryer is evil. It tore apart one sock, and its threads caught up on several other socks, creating a terrible vortex of torn socks. It’s clearly out to get me.

Coming from Minnesota, it’s only just starting to feel like fall in Pittsburgh, but the leaves are already mostly gone! 😓 🍂 Wishing for colder weather…

Just arrived in San Jose for this year’s LLVM Developers Meeting! Tomorrow, I’ll be presenting our ongoing work on BorrowSanitizer—an LLVM instrumentation tool for finding Rust-specific forms of undefined behavior in multilanguage applications.

Most of the people I know who play pickleball these days are surprised that I used to play it in gym class during high school—was that just a midwest/MN thing? I dunno.

#GradualVerification helps developers specify code one component at a time, checking statically where possible and dynamically where necessary.

Come see doubleheader talks on #GradualVerification in #IWACO at #SPLASH 2025 / @icfp-conference.bsky.social! 16:25-17:15 in Peony room 4412.

Working in C++ lately has me missing Rust’s traits and enums.

Digging into backtraces this week—it’s surprising to me how varied and complicated it can be to produce something that I typically take for granted. Especially in a no_std library.

For BorrowSanitizer, we have a no_std requirement, but often times I’ve found that the only crates for solving certain problems rely on std, and that no_std solutions are less maintained. It makes me wonder if tooling would help identify areas where std is unnecessary.

Rust has been a better experience than C++ for me when using unfamiliar APIs. In a large C++ codebase, there are a bunch of unspoken idioms about how to use certain functions correctly that are not always documented. With Rust, these are enforced by the type system.

Lately I’ve been building a tool that requires changed to the Rust compiler’s LLVM backend, which you cannot do through an external plugin. This is good for correctness—ideally, you don’t want to allow third-party plugins to break codegen—but makes it tricky for tools that need that level of access.

11am today at #ICSE2025: Rust provides memory safety to low-level code, but in practice Rust libraries link to unsafe C. @icmccorm.com Josh Sunshine and I used dynamic analysis to find 46 cases where the C code broke Rust's memory rules, causing undefined behavior. Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2404.11671

I’m in Ottawa this week for #icse2025! Always down to chat about #rustlang 🦀

A Study of Undefined Behavior Across Foreign Function Boundaries in #rustlang Libraries

arxiv.org/abs/2404.11671