When the Hard Part Stops Being Hard

A few days ago, a paper I co-authored, Tracking Borrows with Regular Expressions, was accepted to OOPSLA’26. It presents a new type system for Move, a Rust-style smart contract language, built on a rather cute idea: using regular expressions to capture heap reachability. I won’t go into the technical details here. What I want to talk about instead is how the paper was made and how the publication…