---

name: pldi-related-work description: Use when positioning a PLDI paper against the SIGPLAN family and systems neighbors — stating technical deltas per cited line, covering the last few PLDI/POPL/OOPSLA/ICFP cycles, citing PACMPL-era papers in journal form, and verifying every venue attribution on dblp before it ships.

PLDI Related Work

At PLDI, related work is an adversarial exercise: your reviewers are frequently the authors of your closest baselines. The section must therefore do two things — prove you know the landscape's mechanisms (not just its citations), and state, line by line, what this paper does that each prior technique cannot.

The delta discipline

Ban survey sentences ("Much work has studied pointer analysis [3,7,12,19]"). Every citation earns its place with a mechanism and a delta:

Steensgaard-style unification [7] scales linearly but merges all callees' effects; our signatures keep callee effects separate at equal asymptotic cost (§4.3).

If you cannot write the delta clause, you have not read the paper closely enough to cite it at PLDI — where the cited author may be reviewer B.

Coverage map

Neighbor	What to check there	Typical relationship to a PLDI paper
PLDI, last ~4 cycles	The direct competition; reviewers expect these compared, not just cited	Baseline or head-to-head
POPL	The semantic foundations your system builds on	"We implement/scale what [x] formalized"
OOPSLA	Language design, empirical SE-flavored PL studies	Alternative evidence styles for similar claims
ICFP	Functional-language techniques, typed IRs	Technique transfer across paradigms
ASPLOS / CGO / PPoPP	Architecture-facing compilation and parallelism	Same optimization, different evidence bar
CAV / TACAS	Verification engines and solvers	Your backend or your competitor's
ICSE / FSE	Testing and analysis at software-engineering scale	Scale claims to compare honestly

Since POPL, OOPSLA, ICFP, and PLDI all publish in PACMPL, "recent PACMPL papers" is a single searchable stream — sweep it by issue name so a POPL 2025 article does not get labeled PLDI 2025 in your bibliography.

Cite the PACMPL era correctly

PLDI 2023 and later papers are journal articles, not proceedings entries:

@article{gopinathan2023proofrepair,
  author  = {Gopinathan, Kiran and Keoliya, Mayank and Sergey, Ilya},
  title   = {Mostly Automated Proof Repair for Verified Libraries},
  journal = {Proc. ACM Program. Lang.},
  volume  = {7},
  number  = {PLDI},
  articleno = {107},
  year    = {2023},
  doi     = {10.1145/3591221}
}

Pre-2023 PLDI papers keep @inproceedings form with page ranges. Mixing the two conventions — or citing a PACMPL article as "In PLDI '23, pp. ..." — is the most common bibliography error since the switch, and PL reviewers notice.

Verification before submission

• Confirm every venue attribution on dblp; the classics are the traps (LLVM is CGO 2004, CompCert's certification paper is POPL 2006, RustBelt is PACMPL Issue POPL — see resources/exemplars/library.md for the curated list).
• For arXiv-only concurrent work, cite it as a preprint and position gently; it is context, not an archival obligation.
• Double-blind interacts here: your own prior papers appear in third person, cited normally — omitting them is itself an identity signal.

Output format

[Delta audit] citations without a delta clause: <list>
[Coverage] PLDI recent cycles / POPL / OOPSLA / ICFP / systems neighbors — gaps?
[Head-to-head] which cited techniques appear in the evaluation as baselines?
[Bibliography form] PACMPL-era entries in journal form? venues dblp-verified?
[Anonymity] self-citations third person, none omitted?