POPL 2026
Sun 11 - Sat 17 January 2026 Rennes, France
Fri 16 Jan 2026 11:20 - 11:45 at Dortoirs - Specification and Verification Methods Chair(s): Ben Greenman

Differential operators map input changes to output changes and form the building blocks of efficient incremental computations. For example, differential operators for relational algebra are used to perform live view maintenance in database systems. However, few differential operators are known and it is unclear how to develop and verify new efficient operators. In particular, we found that differential operators often need to use internal state to selectively cache relevant information, which is not supported by prior work. To this end, we designed a specification for \emph{stateful differential operators} that allows custom state, yet places sufficient constraints to ensure correctness. We model our specification in Rocq and show that the specification not only guides the design of novel differential operators, but also can capture some of the most sophisticated existing differential operators: database join and Datalog aggregation. We show how to describe complex incremental computations in OCaml by composing stateful differential operators, which we have extracted from Rocq.

Fri 16 Jan

Displayed time zone: Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris change

10:30 - 12:10
Specification and Verification MethodsPOPL at Dortoirs
Chair(s): Ben Greenman University of Utah, USA
10:30
25m
Talk
Abstraction Functions as Types
POPL
Harrison Grodin Carnegie Mellon University, Runming Li Carnegie Mellon University, Robert Harper Carnegie Mellon University
DOI
10:55
25m
Talk
Foundational Multi-Modal Program Verifiers
POPL
Vladimir Gladshtein , George Pîrlea National University of Singapore, Qiyuan Zhao National University of Singapore, Vitaly Kurin Neapolis University Pafos, Ilya Sergey National University of Singapore
DOI
11:20
25m
Talk
Stateful Differential Operators for Incremental Computing
POPL
DOI
11:45
25m
Talk
The Ghosts of Empires: Extracting Modularity from Interleaving-Based Proofs
POPL
Frank Schüssele University of Freiburg, Matthias Zumkeller University of Freiburg, Miriam Lagunes-Rochin University of Freiburg, Dominik Klumpp LIX - CNRS - École Polytechnique; University of Freiburg
DOI