The ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE) is devoted to the principles of software languages: their design, their implementation, and their evolution.

With the ubiquity of computers, software has become the dominating intellectual asset of our time. In turn, this software depends on software languages, namely the languages it is written in, the languages used to describe its environment, and the languages driving its development process. Given that everything depends on software and that software depends on software languages, it seems fair to say that for many years to come, everything will depend on software languages.

Software language engineering (SLE) is the discipline of engineering languages and their tools required for the creation of software. It abstracts from the differences between programming languages, modelling languages, and other software languages, and emphasises the engineering facet of the creation of such languages, that is, the establishment of the scientific methods and practices that enable the best results. While SLE is certainly driven by its metacircular character (software languages are engineered using software languages), SLE is not self-satisfying: its scope extends to the engineering of languages for all and everything.

Like its predecessors, the 19th edition of the SLE conference, SLE 2026, will bring together researchers from different areas united by their common interest in the creation, capture, and tooling of software languages. It overlaps with traditional conferences on the design and implementation of programming languages, model-driven engineering, and compiler construction, and emphasises the fusion of their communities. To foster the latter, SLE traditionally fills a two-day program with a single track, with the only temporal overlap occurring between co-located events.

SLE 2026 will be co-located with STAF 2026 and take place in Rennes, France.

    Community website: https://www.sleconf.org/2026
    Conference website: https://conf.researchr.org/home/sle-2026
    Submission website: https://sle26.hotcrp.com (to come)