Ashton Wiersdorf #

I am a PhD student at the University of Utah where I started in August 2022. My advisor is Ben Greenman. I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brigham Young University in April 2022.

I am interested in researching and designing better programming languages. Programming languages are our interface to computation, and different programming languages shape how we think about solving problems with computation. My current work focuses on macro and type systems: how can we extend languages with macros, and how can we get better guarantees about the behavior of our programs with types? I have also worked a little with static analysis of functional programming languages.

Contact #

Email: blog@lambdaland.org
Matrix: @ashton:matrix.lambdaland.org

You can download my public PGP key here.

You can also find me on these platforms, though I might not answer quickly:

SourceHut
GitHub
Mastodon (via Fosstodon)

Work #

I am part of the PLT @ University of Utah research group. See our work on GitHub.

Publications #

FlowFPX: Nimble tools for debugging floating-point exceptions (JuliaCon 2023) #

Taylor Allred, Xinyi Li, Ashton Wiersdorf, Ben Greenman, and Ganesh Gopalakrishnan

Paper (PDF)
Talk recording (for some reason, the slides look really yellow in the recording)
Slides (PDF; 22M) Slideshow (Keynote → HTML export)

Invited Talks #

Type Tailoring (CPU Reading Group, University of Utah 2023) #

Informal presentation on the ideas behind Type Tailoring.

Intro to Elixir Macros (Utah Elixir 2019) #

Presentation on the basics of Elixir’s macro system.

Projects #

FloatTracker.jl: Julia library providing tracking of floating point errors through a program resources.

Personal projects #

Software #

Type inference with errors: Type inference for a small lambda calculus with decent error messages.
μKanren: Walk through of the μKanren embedded logic language.
lambda-x86: My first compiler, which compiles a small Lisp to x86.

Emacs #

Emacs Bedrock: A minimalist Emacs starter kit focused on built-in functionality and discoverability aids.
Nordic Night: A darker, higher-contrast spin on the lovely Nord theme for Emacs.

Misc. #

Iosevka Output: A custom build of the Iosevka font modeled after the lovely Input Mono font.