SPLASH2026 SRC

ss: A Slide Description Language with Dependence-Scheduled Execution

Yuchi Yamaguchi
2026 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH ’26), Student Research Competition, Oakland, Oct., 5, 2026.

Abstract

Slides often include components that depend on information from across the presentation, such as tables of contents, page numbers, and figure numbers. In programmable slide descriptions, such computations can be written as queries over objects that satisfy specified conditions. To evaluate such queries correctly, all statements creating or updating objects that may be selected must already have executed. Otherwise, later additions and updates may be missed.

In this paper, we propose ss, a slide description language that orders statements according to their dependencies. ss conservatively estimates the object sets and properties read or written by each statement, and uses this information to reorder statements. As a result, document-wide computations can appear before their input objects are defined, without requiring users to manage evaluation order. To our knowledge, this is the first work to explore dependence-scheduled execution in a slide description language.

We also implemented a compiler for ss and used it in a preliminary evaluation showing that its execution model can support practical slide authoring.

Publication

Yuchi Yamaguchi, ss: A Slide Description Language with Dependence-Scheduled Execution, In SPLASH Companion ’26: Companion Proceedings of the 2026 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity, pp. 39-41, ACM, Oct., 2026.
DOI: 10.1145/3837729.3839571