Preface

PLACES 2012 (full title: Programming Language Approaches to Concurrency- and Communication-Centric Software) is the fifth edition of the PLACES workshop series. After the first PLACES, which was affiliated to DisCoTec in 2008, the workshop has been part of ETAPS every year since 2009 and is now an established part of the ETAPS satellite events. PLACES 2012 was held on 31st March in Tallinn, Estonia.

The workshop series was started in order to promote the application of novel programming language ideas to the increasingly important problem of developing software for systems in which concurrency and communication are intrinsic aspects. This includes software for both multi-core systems and large-scale distributed and/or service-oriented systems. The scope of PLACES includes new programming language features, whole new programming language designs, new type systems, new semantic approaches, new program analysis techniques, and new implementation mechanisms.

This year's call for papers attracted 17 submissions, from which the programme committee selected 10 papers for presentation at the workshop. Each paper was reviewed by three PC members, in one case making use of an additional sub-reviewer. The PC then discussed the papers and their reviews in order to produce the final list of accepted papers. We used EasyChair for the whole process, which, as always, made everything very straightforward.

The number of submissions was higher than in previous years, which is an indication of a healthy workshop but makes the selection process more difficult. Several of the rejected papers could have been included if more time had been available for presentations, but we were reluctant to compress the schedule too much; allowing plenty of time for discussion is essential for a successful workshop.

After the workshop, all of the authors were invited to produce revised versions of their papers for inclusion in the EPTCS proceedings. The authors of six papers accepted the invitation, and those papers constitute the present volume.

We would like to thank Benedict Gaster of AMD for his excellent invited talk "Can GPGPU Programming be Liberated from the Data-Parallel Bottleneck? A Style of Braided Parallelism and its Programs". We are very grateful to AMD for paying his travel expenses.

Finally, we would like to thank the ETAPS workshop chairs and local organizers for their help, and the programme committee for their hard work:

• Alastair Beresford, University of Cambridge, UK
• Mario Bravetti, University of Bologna, Italy
• Marco Carbone, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Alastair Donaldson, Imperial College London, UK
• Stephen Fink, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA
• Kohei Honda, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
• Lee Howes, AMD
• Anton Lokhmotov, ARM
• David Pearce, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
• Franz Puntigam, Technical University of Vienna, Austria
• Nikhil Swamy, Microsoft Research, USA
• Ana Lucia Varbanescu, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Jan Vitek, Purdue University, USA

Simon Gay and Paul Kelly

Programme Committee Co-Chairs