PEPM 2026

The ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation (PEPM) has a history going back to 1991 and has been held in conjunction with POPL every year since 2006. The origin of PEPM is in the discoveries of practically useful automated techniques for evaluating programs with only partial input. Over time, PEPM has broadened its scope to include a variety of research areas centered around semantics-based program manipulation — the systematic exploitation of treating programs not only as subject to black-box execution, but also as data structures that can be generated, analyzed, and transformed while establishing or maintaining important semantic properties.

Topics of interest for PEPM 2026 include, but are not limited to:

• Program and model manipulation techniques such as: supercompilation, partial evaluation, fusion, on-the-fly program adaptation, active libraries, program inversion, slicing, symbolic execution, refactoring, decompilation, and obfuscation.

• Techniques that treat programs/models as data objects including metaprogramming, generative programming, embedded domain-specific languages, program synthesis by sketching and inductive programming, staged computation, and model-driven program generation and transformation.

• Program analysis techniques that are used to drive program/model manipulation such as: abstract interpretation, termination checking, binding-time analysis, constraint solving, type systems, automated testing and test case generation.

• Application of the above techniques including case studies of program manipulation in real-world (industrial, open-source) projects and software development processes, descriptions of robust tools capable of effectively handling realistic applications, benchmarking. Examples of application domains include legacy program understanding and transformation, DSL implementations, visual languages and end-user programming, scientific computing, middleware frameworks and infrastructure needed for distributed and web-based applications, embedded and resource-limited computation, and security.

• Cross-fertilization with other fields, such as semantics based and machine-learning based program synthesis and program optimisation, and modeling, analysis, and transformation techniques for distributed and concurrent protocols and programs, such as session types, linear types, and contract specifications.

This list of categories is not exhaustive, and we encourage submissions describing new theories and applications related to semantics-based program manipulation in general. If you have a question as to whether a potential submission is within the scope of the workshop, please contact the programme co-chairs, Yukiyoshi Kameyama (kameyama@acm.org) and Ningning Xie (ningningxie@cs.toronto.edu).

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

Three kinds of submissions will be accepted:

1. Regular Research Papers should describe new results, and will be judged on originality, correctness, significance, and clarity. Regular research papers must not exceed 12 pages.

2. Short Papers may include tool demonstrations and presentations of exciting if not fully polished research, and of interesting academic, industrial, and open-source applications that are new or unfamiliar. Short papers must not exceed 6 pages.

3. Talk Proposals may propose lectures about topics of interest for PEPM, existing work representing relevant contributions, or promising contributions that are not mature enough to be proposed as papers of the other categories. Talk Proposals must not exceed 2 pages.

References and appendices are not included in page limits. Appendices may not necessarily be read by reviewers. All the submissions should be typeset using the two-column ‘sigplan’ sub-format of the new ‘acmart’ format available at: https://sigplan.org/Resources/Author/ and submitted electronically via HotCRP: https://pepm26.hotcrp.com

Reviewing will be single-blind.

Submissions are welcome from PC members (except the two co-chairs).

Accepted regular research papers will appear in formal proceedings published by ACM, and be included in the ACM Digital Library. Accepted short papers do not constitute formal publications and will not appear in the proceedings.

At least one author of each accepted contribution must attend the workshop (physically or virtually) to present the work. In the case of tool demonstration papers, a live demonstration of the described tool is expected.

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 the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.