Synthesis

• [[pull]] Part of the sequence [[thesis, antithesis, synthesis]].
  • [[synthesis]] being my favourite stage perhaps.
  • [[synthesis]] as a mental process feels great.

Program synthesis is cool. Learn more about it!

Deterministic methods aren't as useful as they sound… a complete specification that can generate a program is the program, and is usually just harder than writing the program that follows that specification - though it does act as a second implementation that can precisely validate the first.

If we recognize that we're okay with some undefined behavior, we can describe and synthesize programs with a series of property tests; this can be useful for checking work or if we have a human in the loop to validate everything we're generating (but in this case, we want nondeterminism, deep learning and these sorts of things).

Question Selection for Interactive Program Synthesis (PLDI 2020 - PLDI Resear… Writing a Test Case Generator for a Programming Language: Generating test cases (fuzzing?) for WASM.

Why care about Program Synthesis