Hi! I'm Katherine Philip.

I am a PhD student at Portland State University with a focus on programming language design and implementation for low-level systems programming.

I work on the Habit project, a pure functional language for low-level programming. These days I'm primarily working on formalizing representation transformation, pipelines in the compiler that changes the representation of data. I also hack on Habit's backend compiler mil-tools and collaborate with others hacking on other parts of Habit (frontend compiler, verification, etc).

I'm interested in compiler backends, compiler optimizations, language design, and IDE-friendly compilers and tools. I also like Rust and occasionally hack on rustc.

Previously you may have known me as:

  • HPC Compiler Engineer Intern at NVIDIA, working with the amazing folks at NVHPC Compilers (formerly PGI Compilers). I led the opaque pointers migration project for their LLVM-based compiler.
  • Rust lead at Kodefox. I initiated the company-wide Rust adoption, doing a handful of R&D, writing/recording learning materials and teaching people. When not preaching Rust, I do regular Kodefox things: building web and mobile apps as a fullstack dev.
  • Concept artist & art generalist at Octosoft, developing Renaine, a charming, quirky action-packed platformer. I do all the non-pixel art and a bunch of random pixel art here and there,

On the side,