Professor of Planetary Computing @Cambridge_CL
Cambridge, England
- Tweets 13,004
- Following 1,258
- Followers 6,324
- Likes 19,360
Pinned Tweet
Made the cover of @CACMmag with "A Decade of Docker Containers", recapping much systems work! Docker grew so fast in those early days that we never got a chance to write an academic paper about it, so this writeup has been a long time coming: cacm.acm.org/research/a-deca….
A heady mix of Go, OCaml, Swift, Linux, nested kernels, ancient network protocols like SLIRP, all mixed up into a container cauldron...
The article also comes with cool art and a video interview that was a lot of fun to film around @pembroke1347 and my overgrown office. I left some musings on my blog too anil.recoil.org/notes/cacm-d… with @mugofsoup and @justincormack
1
14
55
6,441
Anil Madhavapeddy retweeted
One of the best things to happen to Indian academia is this human dynamo moving back to India and making awesome things happen there. IIT-M is lucky to have him and smart to promote him.
5
139
6,687
something that trips up students every single year is why OCaml (and Scala and Standard ML and GHC) have list tail functions that error on an empty list, instead of just returning an empty list
13
3
102
16,553
Next week: the dramatic discovery of zstd
We keep improving performance across Claude, and you may have noticed it starts responding sooner!
Claude Code now gzips the conversation it sends on every turn, so it reaches the model faster. Cloud sessions also start up as soon as you start typing.
1
21
1,019
And me! I'm deploying so many throwaway services on @exedev and it's got an auth layer so it can be selectively shared
1
5
707
Welcome to the 2026 Cambridge 1A CST students for their first Foundations of Computer Science lecture! They’ve started a journey in the most rapidly paced eras in our field I’ve ever seen. May the functional programming gods spark the same enduring joy in CS as it did for me :-)
2
30
950
2026w41: a week into full term, and our Computer Science Part II projects are so much fun: everything from 'debugging Bach' with a musical OCaml DSL to figuring out how to teach AI to stop predicting that elephants swim in the oceans off the Gabonese coast anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w4…
3
13
684
You gotta feel (*) for Google, being scooped by OpenAI and Anthropic via phat tweet proof drops while they patiently waited for the Science peer review process (presumably for months).
(*) Like a mild twinge in my neck, I'm not crying or anything
Another big AI math drop. This time from Google DeepMind
Google DeepMind’s AlphaProof Nexus AI solved mathematical questions that had resisted progress for decades.
The system autonomously resolved 9 of 353 open Erdős problems, including 2 that had remained unsolved for 56 years, and also proved 44👀 of 492 open conjectures from the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.
It also resolved an open question in algebraic geometry and improved a known bound in min-max optimization.
The key: pairing an LLM’s ability to generate proofs with Lean’s formal verification. The AI proposes a proof, the checker tests every logical step, and failed attempts produce feedback for another try. Proofs must pass the checker to be accepted.
Researchers also tested a simpler approach. Repeatedly generating candidate proofs with an LLM and checking them in Lean, alongside their more sophisticated search framework.
2
3
21
2,957
Finished up the Cambridge 1A Foundations of Computer Science course notes, now as a forester with toplevels. cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2627/F… This'll may be the last year this course (which has been going for thirty years) will run in its current form, but I need to meditate to figure out its new shape.
4
4
58
3,227
For those curious, our course materials are public in Cambridge. Here's the 1998 version of the Foundations course and the 1A CST Tripos. Robin Milner used to give the intro lectures! It was Standard ML back then, OCaml since 2019. cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1998/I…
2
329
Anil Madhavapeddy retweeted
🗞️ unikernels were hard. key word: were.
ghuntley.com/unikernels
Justin Cormack, who worked on MirageOS back in the day, called me at the pub to talk about why unikernels are coming back. The friction that made them hard is gone; the operating system is design debt, and if you care about security, you should seriously consider them.
23
54
336
25,384
This hardware looks awesome but for god's sake please secure your software layer after reading our paper on NERVE attacks against BCI devices arxiv.org/abs/2609.08971
we've raised $50M from Khosla Ventures, Accel, Initialized, Kevin Weil, DST Global
to build the world's most wearable BCI cap at Sabi
read more here:
forbes.com/sites/rashishriva…
2
11
800
The first thought that sprung to mind when I saw Anthropic's "don't offend your computer" ToC change was Father Jack who LOVED HIS BRICK piped.video/watch?v=R1ZU6UMD…
11
993
O(x)Caml has been an incredibly good target for agentic code in my group, so I jotted a quick blog guide for those who might be persuaded to try out our favourite double-humped ungulate language with agents anil.recoil.org/notes/ocaml-…
3
14
113
4,005
Anil Madhavapeddy retweeted
Big thing in PL: OxCaml style modes combine REALLY well with refinement types!
7
6
77
10,599
Delighted that Bidirectional Type Slicing has been (conditionally) accepted to POPL27, with tons of good expository suggestions from the reviewers! Their attention to detail is massively appreciated. arxiv.org/abs/2607.12197
1
9
54
3,107
Been trying to capture the seasons with my new notes page design. Still not quite there but getting better... anil.recoil.org/notes
7
578
.plan-2026-40: now locked into Cambridge as term starts! Also a fun day trip to Oxford to talk to the Intelligent Earth PhD cohort, and did a mega release of @geotessera 0.11 with wall-to-wall embeddings for 2017-2025 now supported; and security issues in open source projects continue to rumble on like a gastric upset after a particularly fine curry from the Moghul Tandoori anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w4…
303
I'm not sure if I missed it or not, but it feels like computer science never had the same sort of consultation across the academies. Did we just move too fast, or is this just fragmentation across our sub-disciplines?
The London Mathematical Society is currently surveying all editorial board members of all nine LMS journals (I am on the editorial board of two). This is part of a consultation on AI and publishing that will help determine changes to the LMS’s AI policy.
The survey has 36 questions and presents a range of positions on AI, including some fairly extreme ones—on issues such as how to treat papers predominantly drafted with the help of AI, or papers written by someone without expertise in the relevant research area, or how detailed AI declarations must be—and asks editorial board members to rate their agreement with each.
After the survey closes, there will be three online town halls for editorial board members to share and discuss their views on these issues.
I hope that, following the consultation, the LMS will adopt a sensible policy that is pro-AI and upholds Mertonian norms rather than the interests of a section of the mathematical community.
3
11
1,410
What is this POPL of which you speak? Just kidding, come back SIGPLAN we miss you!!!
Over its entire 53-year history, 2,199 papers have been published at @poplconf. Apparently 7,900 papers were just accepted at NeurIPS '26 🤯
1
1
20
2,491