Nicolas van Kempen

I am a Software Engineer at Databricks. My research interests include systems, programming languages, compilers, and performance.

Publications

• 2026
  Nicolas van Kempen, Emery D. Berger

  [ISMM'26] Reconsidering “Reconsidering Custom Memory Allocation”

• 2025
  Nicolas van Kempen, Hyuk-Je Kwon, Dung Tuan Nguyen, Emery D. Berger

  [ASE'25] It's Not Easy Being Green: On the Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages

• 2025
  Kyla H. Levin, Nicolas van Kempen, Emery D. Berger, Stephen N. Freund

  [FSE'25] ChatDBG: Augmenting Debugging with Large Language Models

  Received a Distinguished Artifact Award!

• 2020
  Indu Rasika Churchill, Mohamed Elhamdadi, Nicolas van Kempen

  [SPAS'17] On the Classification of f-Quandles

Posts

• Jun 4, 2025

  Guide: Using dynamic linking/loading to interpose on malloc

• Jun 13, 2024

  Clang-Tidy: Introducing modernize-use-starts-ends-with

• Dec 17, 2023

  Internship report: Catching reference stability bugs with Infer

• Jul 14, 2023

  CMake: Fixing a 4-6x performance regression from unnecessary copies

• Sep 13, 2022

  C++: When to pass by value?