Slava Pestov's corner of the web

Hi there! I live in the Hudson Valley of New York with my family, surrounded by various animals.

Contact details:

My work

My primary professional interest is some combination of programming language design and math.

Apple (2015–)

I'm currently on the Swift language team at Apple.

The Swift generics implementation is one of my main focus areas. I am slowly writing a book about it:

Compiling Swift Generics (2024)

I also worked on Swift's stable ABI and library evolution model:

Library evolution in Swift (2020)

I occasionally give talks:

Implementing Swift generics (2017)
What's new in Swift 4.2 (WWDC 2018)
Design protocol interfaces in Swift (WWDC 2022)
Protocols and associated types in Swift (2023, slides only)

I co-authored a handful of Swift evolution proposals:

Google (2010–2014)

I played a key role in the development of firmware and Linux device drivers for a new data center storage device.

Factor (2003–2010)

I led the development of the Factor programming language.

Factor is a dynamically-typed programming language with a stack-based syntax and a heavy emphasis on interactive development, reflection, and simplicity. The implementation includes an optimizing compiler, cross-platform GUI toolkit, and web framework.

A conference paper:

Factor: a dynamic stack based language (2010)

A talk:

Factor: an extensible interactive language (2008)

jEdit (1998–2003)

I also wrote jEdit, a popular programmer's text editor.

jEdit has a plugin system, built on top of the dynamic features of the Java virtual machine. A tool within the editor can download and install plugins from a central registry. This was an early form of the "package manager" found in many popular text editors and languages today.

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