David Pearce

David created Whiley, a working programming language that lets a compiler attempt to check conditions that code is expected to satisfy. It gives developers earlier feedback on some errors and provides researchers with a practical setting for verification work. Conference papers, keynotes and demonstrations also share approaches to checking software with programming-language and developer communities.

David Pearce is Staff Engineer at Consensys and Adjunct Professor at Victoria University of Wellington. After completing an undergraduate degree and PhD at Imperial College in London, research has focused on programming languages, compilers and program analysis, with a core emphasis on finding software errors during compilation before code runs.

David created Whiley to put these principles into practice. The language incorporates checks of program constraints directly into compilation, giving developers earlier feedback on correctness errors and providing a working environment for research into software verification.

Presentations and papers share this work across academic and industrial communities. David delivered the 2022 GPCE keynote on language design and verifying compilers, alongside talks on specification-based testing and Whiley demonstrations for the Wellington Java User Group and Oracle Labs Brisbane. These contributions connect language research with questions familiar to testing and engineering teams: how to describe expected behaviour and detect mistakes sooner.