FoPSS 2026         @ FLOC

 

6th Summer School on Foundations of Programming and Software Systems

 

13-17th July 2026

 

Emerging Approaches for Reasoning about Programs and Proofs

 

The 2026 Foundations of Programming and Software Systems (FoPSS) Summer School brings together students and researchers to explore "Emerging Approaches for Reasoning about Programs and Proofs." This week-long school provides a broad and immersive introduction to the latest developments on reasoning about programming. This year’s edition is dedicated to recent methodologies, spanning advanced type systems, proof assistants and logic, and neurosymbolic approaches, that are actively shaping the frontier of software verification and program semantics.

 

Our program features a distinguished series of lectures designed to equip participants with both a solid grounding in established foundations and a forward-looking perspective on the field's future. By diving into highly active research areas, attendees will gain the theoretical tools necessary to reason rigorously about complex, modern programs. Through engaging instruction and collaborative discussions, the school aims to inspire the next generation of researchers to push the boundaries of what is possible in formal reasoning and program verification.

 

The series of Summer Schools on Foundations of Programming and Software Systems (FoPSS) was jointly created by EATCS, ETAPS, ACM SIGLOG and ACM SIGPLAN. The first FoPPS was organized in 2017.

 

The goal is to introduce the participants to various aspects of computation theory and programming languages.

 

The school, spread over a single week, is aimed at students and researchers in Theoretical Computer Science, broadly construed.

 

Each year the school is focused on a particular, actively researched topic.

 


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Amal Ahmed

Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Northeastern University

 

Formally Specifying ABIs Using Realistic Realizability

 

The Application Binary Interface (ABI) for a language specifies the interoperability rules for each of its target platforms, including properties such as data layout and calling conventions. Compliance with these rules ensures “safe” execution and may provide certain guarantees about resource usage. These rules are relied upon by compilers for that language and others, as well as libraries and foreign-function interfaces. Unfortunately, ABIs are typically specified in prose and, while type systems for source languages have grown richer over time, ABIs have largely remained the same, lacking analogous advances in expressivity and safety guarantees.

In these lectures, I’ll outline a vision for richer, semantic ABIs that would facilitate safer interoperability and library integrations, supported by a novel methodology for formally specifying ABIs using realizability models. These semantic ABIs relate abstract, high-level types to unwieldy, but well-behaved, low-level code. I’ll illustrate the approach with a case study, showing how this methodology leverages the last two decades of progress on separation logics and semantic models. I’ll also discuss different practically-motivated ABI design decisions and how they can be formalized via a semantic ABI, including a Swift-style ABI with library evolution. Finally, I’ll describe a new verified compiler backend we’re building to enable easier specification of ABIs for the WebAssembly platform for high-level languages in the future.

 

Attending

 

The 6 th FoPPS will be co-located with FLOC 2026 the 9th Federated Logic Conference, in the week prior to the main conferences, and will take place in Lisbon, Portugal. Informations about registration will be announced soon.

 

Planned Schedule

 

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Fri

Registration

Vasconcelos

Vasconcelos

Pfenning

Pfenning

coffee

coffee

coffee

coffee

Vazou

Vazou

Amin

Amin

Closing

lunch

lunch

lunch

lunch

Opening

Ahmed

Ahmed

Lindley

Lindley

coffee

coffee

coffee

coffee

Krebbers

Krebbers

Brun

Brun

Social Dinner

 

Organizing Committee

 

Luís Caires, INESC ID and Técnico, University of Lisbon

José Fragoso, INESC ID and Técnico, University of Lisbon

Andreia Mordido, LASIGE and Ciências, University of Lisbon

Bernardo Toninho, INESC ID and Técnico, University of Lisbon