Rachit Nigam (original) (raw)
I build programming languages and compilers to make it easy to design and_use_ specialized hardware. My work is driven by the need to answer fundamental questions that about hardware–software systems and using the answers to build elegant systems. My PhD answered three such questions:
What fundamentally distinguishes hardware design from software programming?
Hardware designs must explicitly reason about discrete time.Filament is a new hardware description language that uses a type-system to explicitly reason about time and uses it to provide strong guarantees about the generated circuits. Filament’s ideas have influenced the design of Google’s XLS project and Jane Street’s Hardcaml language.
How do we design a scalable compiler infrastructure for hardware synthesis?
By intermixing software and hardware abstractions into one intermediate language.Calyx is a compiler infrastructure for transforming computational descriptions into efficient circuits. Calyx has been adopted by the LLVM CIRCT project and is the basis for several industrial and academic tools.
How can formal methods help reason about performance?
Types systems can encode low-level constraints within high-level languages.Dahlia shows how a novel kind of substructural type system captures circuit-level constraints within an imperative, loop-based language and uses it to ensure that every well-typed program makes predictable performance trade-offs.
At MIT, I direct the Foundations of Languages and Machines (FLAME) labwhere we continue asking such questions and building new systems. If these directions excite you, take a look at information for prospective students.
News
Jun ’25
Student Research Competition co-chair, PLMW invited talk, PLMW panel, and program committee member for PLDI 2025.
May ’25
Invited talks at Jane Street Xcelerate Colloquium and the NYU PL/FM Seminar.
Publications
Conferences
ASPLOS ’26
Rachit Nigam, , Edmund Lam, Carolyn Zech, Jonathan Balkind, Adrian Sampson
Thesis ’25
Rachit Nigam
SIGPLAN Distinguished Dissertation
SIGARCH/TCCA Outstanding Dissertation (Hon. Mention)
ASPLOS ’23
Distinguished Artifact Award