Slava Pestov's home page

Hi there! I live in the Hudson Valley of New York with my family, surrounded by various animals.

Feel free to e-mail me for any reason, including potential job opportunities, if you think my skills might be a good fit.

Math

I have some fun results about finitely-presented monoids:

Slava's Monoid Zoo (2026)

Programming

Apple (2015–)

Currently I'm on the Swift team at Apple. I am the second-most active contributor to the compiler's git repository.

While I was not involved in the design of the expression type checker, recently I've been doing some work to speed it up:

Recent improvements to the type checker (2026)

Prior to that, I overhauled the Swift generics implementation, and wrote a book about it:

Compiling Swift Generics [source] (2022, ongoing)

I also worked on Swift's stable ABI and library evolution model for shared libraries:

Library evolution in Swift (2020)

I've given a few talks:

Implementing Swift generics (LLVM Dev Mtg, 2017)
What's new in Swift 4.2 (WWDC, 2018)
Design protocol interfaces in Swift (WWDC, 2022)
Protocols and associated types in Swift (Cornell, 2023)
Type checking Swift in reasonable time (pre-FOSDEM Swift Social, 2026)

Last but not least, 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. Also worked on tools to collect and analyze storage performance across Google's fleet.

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.