This volume contains the papers presented at APLAS 2010, the eighth Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems, held from November 28 to December 1, 2010, in Shanghai, China. The symposium was sponsored by the Asian Association for Foundation of Software (AAFS) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

APLAS is a premiere forum for the discussion of programming languages, based in Asia and serving the worldwide research community. The past APLAS symposia were successfully held in Seoul (2009), Bangalore (2008), Singapore (2007), Sydney (2006), Tsukuba (2005), Taipei (2004), and Beijing (2003), after three well-attended workshops held in Shanghai (2002), Daejeon (2001), and Singapore (2000). Proceedings of the past symposia were published in Springer’s LNCS volumes 2895, 3302, 3780, 4279, 4807, 5356, and 5904.

The 23 papers presented together with 4 invited papers 2 system and tool presentations and 1 tutorial lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from 95 initial submissions. The papers are devoted to both foundational and practical issues in programming languages and systems and feature current research in the following areas: semantics, logics, foundational theory, design of languages and foundational calculi, type systems, compilers, interpreters, abstract machines, program derivation, analysis, transformation, software security, safety, verification, concurrency, constraints, domain-specific languages, as well as tools for programming, verification, and implementation.