Systems Lunch
Title: Programmer Tools with Program Synthesis
Abstract: Program synthesis is the problem of generating a program to satisfy a specification of user intent. Since these specifications are usually partial, this means searching a space candidate programs for one that exhibits the desired behavior. A lion's share of the work on program synthesis focuses on new ways to perform the search, but allowing the user to communicate intent remains a major challenge. Synthesis tools are often designed either with no particular group of users in mind, or for domain-specific users such as Excel users or data scientists. We wish to leverage synthesis to create better tools for developers, which means we should narrow our focus and our understanding of our users. Focusing on any subgroup of users allows making assumptions on both the input the user can generate for the synthesizer and the output they can consume. In the case of developers, concepts that are part of the programmer's life such as code review and read-eval-print loops (REPL) can be leveraged for interactions with a synthesizer. This talk describes two synthesis-based tools that both leverage and cater to programmers as their users. However, designing for the user can put the interface of the synthesizer at odds with state of the art synthesis techniques. Synthesis is, at best, a computationally hard problem, and many existing program synthesis tools and techniques were designed around the synthesizer and its internals, their the user interface dictated by the needs of the synthesizer. We therefore demonstrate the process of concurrently building both the synthesizer and its intended user-facing tool as a solution to this problem.
Bio: Hila Peleg is a postdoctoral researcher in the CSE Department at University of California, San Diego, advised by Nadia Polikarpova. She recieved her PhD at the Technion, Israel. She also holds a degree in literature. Her research explores the way program synthesis can be transformed into tools for developers.
Registration and a passcode are required for this event. If you would like to attend this talk and need the Zoom information, please register here to receive Zoom links and passcodes for the Systems Lunch events from Emery Berger.