Optimizing synthesis with metasketches

Many advanced programming tools—for both end-users and expert developers—rely on program synthesis to automatically generate implementations from high-level specifications. These tools often need to employ tricky, custom-built synthesis algorithms because they require synthesized programs to be not only correct, but also optimal with respect to a desired cost metric, such as program size. Finding these optimal solutions efficiently requires domain-specific search strategies, but existing synthesizers hard-code the strategy, making them difficult to reuse. This paper presents metasketches, a general framework for specifying and solving optimal synthesis problems. Metasketches make the search strategy a part of the problem definition by specifying a fragmentation of the search space into an ordered set of classic sketches. We provide two cooperating search algorithms to effectively solve metasketches. A global optimizing search coordinates the activities of local searches, info...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: POPL
• Authors: James Bornholt, Emina Torlak, Dan Grossman, Luis Ceze
• Keywords: POPL 2016, Programming Languages