Double exposure of blc among leaves, by Eszti Lujber

Hello, World!

My name is Basil Contovounesios (Greek: Βασίλης Κοντοβουνήσιος). I’m a computer programmer (codewright?) fascinated with languages (natural, programming, formal), compilers, and Emacs.

contact

Reach me (and share interesting etymology) via:

Email
basil@contovou.net
Public key
PGP
Mastodon
@blc@libretooth.gr
Location
Budapest, HU

projects

Where your email will most often find me (if not on a hill, in a book, or doing anything but what I ought to be doing). I’m at least partially implicated in WebP animation, JSON encoding in Lisp, UPower battery status reporting, and many other misdemeanours in Emacs. My latest work-in-progress is built-in support for AVIF images and PDF documents (too long an itch left unscratched).

Somewhere along the line I seem to have adopted the Dash, Ivy, Swiper, Counsel, and Hackernews packages as their maintainer. I also put together the Olmacs dynamic module – it was a delight learning how to use the entire(!?) GNU Autotools stack for this.

Find more of my activities on Savannah, SourceHut, GitLab, GitHub, StackExchange, or in my CV.

publications

My old colleagues and I recently did a thing!

Tracking Dynamically Bound Variable Dependencies

Tsung-Han Liu, Basil L. Contovounesios, Yawen Guan, Clément Pit-Claudel
International Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Static Analysis (TPSA 2026)
Abstract · workshop page · development Some Lisp dialects rely heavily on ‘action at a distance’ through dynamically bound variables. We present an analysis that approximates the transitive dynamic-variable dependencies of Emacs Lisp programs, as well as those of Emacs Lisp primitives written in C. Applied to the Emacs code base and 210 popular ELisp libraries, our prototype implementation surfaces subtle bugs and reveals unexpectedly large dynamic-variable dependency sets.