miniKanren 2026

The miniKanren and Relational Programming Workshop is a workshop about relational programming with an emphasis on the miniKanren family of languages: miniKanren, microKanren, core.logic, OCanren, Guanxi, etc. The scope of “relational programming” includes pure logic programming, constraint programming, and specification with inductively-defined relations (as in proof assistants), especially approaches that support “running programs backwards”, program synthesis, etc. The workshop solicits papers and talks on the design, implementation, theory, and application of such languages. A major goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers, implementors, and users from the miniKanren community to share expertise and techniques for relational programming. Another goal for the workshop is to push the state of the art of relational programming — for example, by developing new techniques for writing interpreters, type inferencers, theorem provers, abstract interpreters, CAD tools, program synthesizers, procedural generators, action planners, property-based testers, and other interesting programs as relations.

This year, we encourage submissions along the special theme of Relating Relational Languages: cross-pollinating ideas between the miniKanren community and communities of language developers and users working with related relational techniques, including proof assistants, solver-aided programming tools, datalog-style languages, equality saturation languages, et cetera. We encourage submissions from relational programmers outside the miniKanren community who want to participate in this knowledge exchange, and we especially encourage submissions that explicitly compare, contrast, translate, and otherwise relate miniKanren to these other systems.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

The 2026 miniKanren and Relational Programming Workshop is calling for submissions.

Submissions are due Friday June 5, 2026 (Updated!).

Authors will be notified by Wednesday, July 1, 2026 (Updated!).

Camera-ready versions are due Tuesday, July 21, 2026 (Updated!).

The workshop will be held in Indianapolis, USA, on Monday August 24, 2026 (the day before ICFP).

All deadlines are (23:59 UTC-12), “Anywhere on Earth”.

Scope

The miniKanren and Relational Programming Workshop is a workshop about relational programming with an emphasis on the miniKanren family of languages: miniKanren, microKanren, core.logic, OCanren, Guanxi, etc. The scope of “relational programming” includes pure logic programming, constraint programming, and specification with inductively-defined relations (as in proof assistants), especially approaches that support “running programs backwards”, program synthesis, etc. The workshop solicits papers and talks on the design, implementation, theory, and application of such languages. A major goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers, implementors, and users from the miniKanren community to share expertise and techniques for relational programming. Another goal for the workshop is to push the state of the art of relational programming — for example, by developing new techniques for writing interpreters, type inferencers, theorem provers, abstract interpreters, CAD tools, program synthesizers, procedural generators, action planners, property-based testers, and other interesting programs as relations.

This year, we encourage submissions along the special theme of Relating Relational Languages: cross-pollinating ideas between the miniKanren community and communities of language developers and users working with related relational techniques, including proof assistants, solver-aided programming tools, datalog-style languages, equality saturation languages, et cetera. We encourage submissions from relational programmers outside the miniKanren community who want to participate in this knowledge exchange, and we especially encourage submissions that explicitly compare, contrast, translate, and otherwise relate miniKanren to these other systems.

Format

We want to encourage all kinds of submissions. We expect short papers as well as longer papers. As a rough guideline, with the new ACM format, a short paper would be 2 to 7 pages and a long paper 8 to 25 pages. Submission Information

Paper submissions must use the format acmart and its sub-format acmsmall. Here is the preamble in LaTeX: \documentclass[acmsmall,screen,review,anonymous]{acmart}

Authors are encouraged to publish any code associated with their papers under an open-source license, so that reviewers may try the code and verify the claims.

Submissions must be anonymized and should not contain any identifying information. It is recommended to use the review option when submitting a paper; this option enables line numbers for easy reference in reviews.

Reviewing Process

We will use lightweight-double-blind reviewing. Submitted papers must omit author names and institutions and reference the authors’ own related work in the third person (e.g., not “we build on our previous work…” but rather “we build on the work of…”).

The purpose is to help the reviewers come to an initial judgement about the paper without bias, not to make it impossible for them to discover the authors if they were to try. Nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing the paper more difficult (e.g., important background references should not be omitted or anonymized).

Proceedings will be published on https://arxiv.org/.

Publication of a paper at this workshop is not intended to replace conference or journal publication and does not preclude re-publication of a more complete or finished version of the paper at some later conference or in a journal.

Please submit through the miniKanren Workshop HotCRP site:

https://minikanren26.hotcrp.com/

Participant Support

Attendees with accepted papers can apply for a SIGPLAN PAC grant to help cover participation-related expenses. PAC also offers other support, such as for child-care expenses during the meeting or for accommodations for members with physical disabilities. For details on the PAC program, see its web page.