Congratulations to Sebastien Bonduelle, a Ph.D. student in the Épicure team, who received the Radhia Cousot Young Researcher Best Paper Award at the SAS'26 (Static Analysis Symposium) conference for his paper titled “Determinism Analysis and its Application to Evaluation Order Independence” (co-authored with Benoît Montagu and Thomas Jensen).
This work falls within the scope of static analysis of programs, a branch of software safety and security whose goal is to automatically provide formal guarantees (that is, accompanied by a mathematical proof) that a program cannot produce errors during its execution. The results presented in this article provide guarantees that a program will always produce the same result when executed multiple times under the same conditions (the property of determinism). For many programming languages, software determinism is not guaranteed. In fact, the order of execution of the various parts of a computer may allow for several “degrees of freedom,” which an interpreter or compiler can exploit as it sees fit. These choices, which are beyond the control of the software author, can influence the resulting output: this is a source of potential bugs, which this work makes it possible to detect—without fail!