Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Erlang

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the Nineteenth ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop (Erlang’20), which is once again co-located with the annual International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP), held as a virtual event this year. The workshop continues the tradition of being a forum for presenting research efforts and experience reports on all aspects of theory, implementation, and applications of the Erlang language and BEAM-related technologies, covering topics such as functional programming, distribution, concurrency, and scalability. The Erlang model of concurrent programming has been widely emulated, for example by Akka in Scala, Java and now Swift, and a wave of exciting programming languages are being developed on top of the Erlang VM (BEAM), such as Elixir or adaptations of Clojure. The call for papers attracted this year a total of 8 submissions, each of which were carefully reviewed by at least four program committee members. To ensure fairness and preserve the anonymity of all authors and reviewers, papers authored by PC chairs were handled out-of-band by Natalia Chechina. The reviews were handled using the HotCRP system using "tokens", a mechanism designed to keep the reviewers anonymous even from the chairs. This year, a new initiative started to team up practitioners with experienced researchers to support them in writing their first research paper. One paper emerging from such a collaboration was submitted and also accepted for publication in the standard review process. In total, the program committee accepted four long and one short paper for publication. Additionally, the steering committee invited the founders of Avassa for a panel discussion to talk about Erlang-fuelled inventions. The discussion will be led by Johnny Winn, who is also the host of the Elixir Fountain Podcast. Putting together Erlang’20 has been a team effort. First of all, we thank the panellists and the authors of all submitted papers for allowing us to assemble an inspiring and appealing program. We express our gratitude to all members of the program committee, who reviewed the papers in a timely manner despite the situation due to COVID-19, providing constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement. We also greatly appreciate the efforts of this year’s ICFP Chairs, led by Stephanie Weirich as General Chair, and the workshop co-chairs, Jennifer Hackett and Leonidas Lampropoulos, who diligently answered our questions and guided us through the organisational process. Special thanks go to the virtualization committee of ICFP’20 for taking care of the online meeting arrangements: your hard work makes our experiences great. We would also like to thank the members of the Erlang Workshop’s Steering Committee for their guidance and to the Ericsson OTP team for maintaining the Erlang’20 web site. Finally, we thank ACM SIGPLAN for their continued support. We hope that these proceedings will serve as a valuable reference for Erlang and BEAM-based language researchers, implementors, and practitioners, and that you will find this year’s program appealing and thought-provoking.