Call for Papers

PLDI is a premier forum for programming language research, broadly construed, including design, implementation, theory, applications, and performance. PLDI seeks outstanding research that extends and/or applies programming-language concepts to advance the field of computing. Novel system designs, thorough empirical work, well-motivated theoretical results, and new application areas are all welcome emphases in strong PLDI submissions.

Authors of empirical papers are encouraged to consider the seven categories of the SIGPLAN Empirical Evaluation Guidelines when preparing their submissions.
Evaluation Criteria and Process

Reviewers will evaluate each contribution for its accuracy, significance, originality, and clarity. Submissions should be organized to communicate clearly to a broad programming-language audience as well as to experts on the paper’s topics. Papers should identify what has been accomplished and how it relates to previous work.

Deadlines and formatting requirements, detailed below, will be strictly enforced, with extremely rare extenuating circumstances considered at the discretion of the Program Chair.

In almost all cases, reviews will be performed by a subset of the Program Committee (PC), the External Program Committee (EPC), and the External Review Committee (ERC). Authors will have the opportunity to respond to initial reviews to correct and clarify technical concerns. The PC will make final accept/reject decisions except for papers with PC authors—such papers will have no PC reviewers and the EPC will make final decisions.

Authors may contact only the Program Chair about submitted papers during and after the review process. Contacting PC, EPC, or ERC members about submitted paper(s) is an ethical violation and may be grounds for summary rejection.
Double-Blind Reviewing

PLDI uses double-blind reviewing. This means that author names and affiliations must be omitted from the submission. Additionally, if the submission refers to prior work done by the authors, that reference should be made in third person. These are firm submission requirements. Any supplementary material must also be anonymized.

The FAQ on Double-Blind Reviewing clarifies the policy for the most common scenarios. But there are many gray areas and trade-offs. If you have any doubts about how to interpret the double blind rules, please contact the Program Chair.
Submission Site Information

The submission site is https://pldi2020.hotcrp.com.

Authors can submit multiple times prior to the (firm!) deadline. Only the last submission will be reviewed. There is no abstract deadline. The submission site requires entering author names and affiliations, relevant topics, and potential conflicts. Addition or removal of authors after the submission deadline will need to be approved by the Program Chair (as this kind of change potentially undermines the goal of eliminating conflicts during paper assignment).

The submission deadline is 11:59PM November 22, 2019 anywhere on earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_on_Earth
Declaring Conflicts

When submitting the paper, you will need to declare potential conflicts. Conflicts should be declared between an adviser and an advisee (e.g., Ph.D., post-doc). Other conflicts include institutional conflicts, financial conflicts of interest, friends or relatives, or any recent co-authors on papers and proposals (last 2 years).

Please do not declare spurious conflicts: such incorrect conflicts are especially harmful if the aim is to exclude potential reviewers, so spurious conflicts can be grounds for rejection. If you are unsure about a conflict, please consult the Program Chair.
Formatting Requirements

Papers should be formatted according to the two-column ACM proceedings format. Each paper should have no more than 12 pages, excluding bibliography, in 10pt font. There is no limit on the page count for references. Each reference must list all authors of the paper (do not use et al). The citations should be in numeric style, e.g., [52]. Submissions should be in PDF format and printable on US Letter and A4 sized paper. These requirements are all the same as in the previous year.

Papers that exceed the length requirement or deviate from the expected format will be rejected.

Make sure that figures and tables are legible, even after the paper is printed in gray-scale.

Appendices should not be part of the paper, but should be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material should also be anonymized, as described below. These requirements are also the same as last year.

As explained in more detail at http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Author, LaTeX users should use the sigplan subformat of the acmart format by downloading acmart-sigplanproc.zip. Word users should use the acmart template for Word. These are the same files as last year. Please note the following:

acmart-sigplanproc-template.tex has the correct defaults for PLDI 2020 submissions. Specifically, the first line should be \documentclass[sigplan,10pt,review,anonymous]{acmart}\settopmatter{printfolios=true,printccs=false,printacmref=false}. The default citation style is numeric.
Do not mess with the class file or settings to try to sneak in additional space. (Conversely, you may toggle the printccs and printacmref flags if you wish, but these changes will consume space.)
Do not use the PACMPL files or format; PLDI is not using them. However, the template files were designed to make migrating a paper from one format to the other as simple as possible.

Supplementary Material

Authors are free to provide supplementary material if that material supports the claims in the paper. Such material may include proofs, experimental results, and/or data sets. This material should be uploaded at the same time as the submission. Reviewers are not required to examine the supplementary material but may refer to it if they would like to find further evidence supporting the claims in the paper.
Plagiarism and Concurrent Work

Papers must describe unpublished work that is not currently submitted for publication elsewhere as described by the SIGPLAN Republication Policy: http://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Policies/Republication/. Authors should also be aware of the ACM Policy on Plagiarism: https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism-overview. Concurrent submissions to other conferences, workshops, journals, or similar venues of publication are disallowed. Prior work must, as always, be cited and referred to in the third person even if it is the authors’ work, so as to preserve author anonymity. If you have further questions, contact the Program Chair.
Artifact Evaluation for Accepted Papers

The authors of accepted PLDI papers will be invited to submit supporting materials to the Artifact Evaluation process. Artifact Evaluation is run by a separate committee whose task is to assess how well the artifacts support the work described in the papers. This submission is voluntary but encouraged and will not influence the final decision regarding the papers. Papers that go through the Artifact Evaluation process successfully will receive a badge printed on the papers themselves. Authors of accepted papers are encouraged to make these materials publicly available upon publication of the proceedings, by including them as “source materials” in the ACM Digital Library.
Accepted Papers

Accepted papers will be made available (once the conference starts and for one month following) via 1-click download from the ACM Digital Library.
Publication Date

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. (For those rare conferences whose proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library after the conference is over, the official publication date remains the first day of the conference.)
Acknowledgments

This call-for-papers is an adaptation and evolution of content from previous instances of PLDI. We are grateful to prior organizers for their work, which is reused here.