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Program sketching

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Abstract

Sketching is a synthesis methodology that aims to bridge the gap between a programmer’s high-level insights about a problem and the computer’s ability to manage low-level details. In sketching, the programmer uses a partial program, a sketch, to describe the desired implementation strategy, and leaves the low-level details of the implementation to an automated synthesis procedure. In order to generate an implementation from the programmer provided sketch, the synthesizer uses counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS). Inductive synthesis refers to the process of generating candidate implementations from concrete examples of correct or incorrect behavior. CEGIS combines a SAT-based inductive synthesizer with an automated validation procedure, a bounded model-checker, that checks whether the candidate implementation produced by inductive synthesis is indeed correct and to produce new counterexamples. The result is a synthesis procedure that is able to handle complex problems from a variety of domains including ciphers, scientific programs, and even concurrent data-structures.

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  1. Massachussets Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA

    Armando Solar-Lezama

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  1. Armando Solar-Lezama
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Correspondence to Armando Solar-Lezama.

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Solar-Lezama, A. Program sketching. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 15, 475–495 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-012-0249-7

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