popl-submission

Business

Use when preparing a POPL submission for the single July HotCRP deadline — auditing the 25-pages-of-text acmsmall cap, summary-rejection format rules, full double-blind hygiene for theory papers with public proof repositories, dual-submission exposure, and the final-days upload order before the AoE cutoff.

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Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills/blob/HEAD/POPL-Skills/skills/popl-submission/SKILL.md

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POPL Submission

Audit against the cycle you are actually entering. The mechanics below come from the POPL 2027 research-papers call, read 2026-07-08 through search renderings of popl27.sigplan.org (direct fetches were blocked — see resources/official-source-map.md). POPL 2027's cutoff was July 9, 2026, 11:59 PM AoE, one day after that check: confirm the live dates page before assuming any window is open.

The 2027-cycle mechanics

One July deadline, no abstract deadline. POPL 2027 papers were due July 9, 2026 AoE, uploaded to popl27.hotcrp.com. Nothing pre-registers the submission, so a paper can materialize on deadline day — and so can your forgotten conflicts list. A missed July means the next POPL is a year out (though PACMPL siblings offer intermediate deadlines; see popl-workflow).
25 pages of text, bibliography excluded, in the PACMPL layout: acmart with the acmsmall option, single column, 10 pt font on 12 pt line spacing, a 5.478 in by 7.884 in text block. The call names summary rejection as the consequence of a shrunken font or widened block, and PACMPL takes no Word files.
Full double-blind. Since POPL 2023 this replaced the older lightweight regime: reviewers never see author names, and identities are revealed only after conditional-acceptance decisions, only for the papers that made it.

Where theory papers deanonymize themselves

A semantics or verification paper leaks identity through different channels than an ML paper: a Rocq/Coq development already public under your group's namespace, a paper-named logic that only one lab builds on, "in our previous work [7]" phrasing, and appendix PDFs generated with author metadata intact.

pdfinfo main.pdf | grep -iE 'author|producer'
pdftotext main.pdf - | grep -niE 'our (previous|earlier) (work|paper)|github|gitlab|zenodo|orcid' | head
tar tzf supplement.tar.gz | grep -E '\.git/|home/[a-z]+/|_CoqProject.*~' | head

Cite your own prior papers in the third person, scrub \author blocks and grant lines, and route any proof development through an anonymized mirror rather than the lab repository.

Severity table

Failure	Likely outcome under the 2027 call	Can it be repaired after the deadline?
Text beyond 25 pages or altered format	Summary rejection	No
Word manuscript	Not accepted by PACMPL tooling	No
Author-identifying PDF or supplement	Chair action against double-blind policy	No
Same result under review elsewhere	Dual-submission violation	No
Main theorem stated without its assumptions	Survives triage, dies in review	Only before upload
Missing HotCRP conflicts/topics	Assignment errors, wasted expert reviews	Sometimes, at chair discretion

Last-72-hours order of operations

Freeze definitions and theorem numbering; late renumbering desyncs body, appendix, and proof scripts.
Rebuild the PDF from a clean clone so no stale lemma statement survives.
Run the leak scan above on the paper and every supplementary archive.
Fill HotCRP metadata — title, abstract, topics, conflicts — a day early; the form is fast, but conflict lists take thought.
Upload well before 11:59 PM AoE and re-download your own submission to verify the PDF the committee will see.

Output format

[POPL submission audit] pass / blockers found
[Format] <25-page text count, acmsmall compliance, PDF build>
[Anonymity] <leak-scan findings across paper, appendix, proof archive>
[Policy] <dual submission, prior publication, conflicts>
[Remaining actions] <ordered, with owner and cutoff time in AoE>