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Helical in Rust : ORM time

It's been almost a year since I started on my Helical rewrite in Rust (with a sizable dose of help and motivation from John!). I wrote the prototype in Python and while Gwen has been a good sport about alerting me to usability issues, the truth is that updating the core code is getting unruly. I've also been re-doing some of the program analysis stuff so that it's cleaner, less ad hoc, and generally more amenable to an interesting paper about the program semantics. However, I've let myself get distracted over the past year on other things, so I'm going to try to be more disciplined about getting the Rust rewrite done. In services of that I've decide to blog my way through the process, since like a lot of people I haaaaaaaate context switching and having to pick up where I left off.

Challenges with Locality and State in ExPL Annotations, Part I

ExPL, the experiment specification language of Helical, relies on user-provided annotations to infer an implicit post-interventional causal structure and query set. Annotations are attached to ExPL expressions and provide a link to the program variables in HyPL. Because ExPL encodes stateful executions, we need to be able to reason about the scope over which stateful operations apply. In this two-part blog post we'll talk about some challenges associated with using these annotations.

POPL 2015 Artifact Evaluation Revisted

Just over a decade again POPL ran its first artifact evaluation and I was on it! I'm listed in the proceedings as "Emma F. Tosch" as an inside joke with Arjun, who ran the committee. I have what only I think is a Very Interesting Tale of reviewing, but that's not what this post is about. Instead, this post is about tracking down those old artifacts with just a pinch of oral history.

What even is a "parameter"?

"Parameter" is one of those commonly used words in mathematics and computing and in my experience is rarely explicitly defined. While most uses have similar meanings, there can be small differences in their interpretation. Parameters and other statistical entities are important to the semantics and correctness of the Helical system, so it's worth considering what we mean by these terms.