As you may know, I am leaving Microsoft Research at the end of November. Time for something new! I am going to start a new role as Engineering Fellow at Epic Games 221 in December.

Epic is doing all sorts of interesting things – not just games but other virtual reality stuff suchf as special effects for films, design visualisation, architecture, and so on. I will be working with my long-time colleague Lennart Augustsson and a team of others, on Verse. Verse is a new programming language that Epic is designing for their games, and in due course for the metaverse 732 (e.g. listen to Tim Sweeney’s SigGraph 2019 talk 420). I also expect to work with Dan Piponi on data-centre-scale transactional memory. And probably more.

Epic is also happy for me to spend a substantial amount of time on education, on functional programming research, and Haskell and GHC in particular. I think this is extremely generous, and it means that I will continue to be pretty active in these areas.

Simon

PS: In fact Epic is looking for more people who know about programming language implementation (implementing Verse), and/or formal verification (reasoning about Verse). If you’d be interested, drop me a line.