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:

Work

Apple (2015–)

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

I am writing a book about the Swift generics implementation:

Compiling Swift Generics (2022, ongoing)

I found some finitely-presented monoids that do not admit finite complete presentations:

⟨a, b | aba=aa, baa=aab⟩ (2025)
⟨a, b | aaa=a, abba=bb⟩ (2025)

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

Library evolution in Swift (2020)

I gave a few 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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