Combinatorial sketching for finite programs

• Published in: ACM SIGPLAN notices 2006-11, Vol.41 (11), p.404-415
• Main Authors: SOLAR-LEZAMA, Armando, TANCAU, Liviu, BODIK, Rastislav, SARASWAT, Vijay, SESHIA, Sanjit
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Computer science; control theory; systems; Exact sciences and technology; Programming languages; Software
• ISSN: 1523-2867; 0362-1340; 1558-1160
• DOI: 10.1145/1168918.1168907

Sketching is a software synthesis approach where the programmer develops a partial implementation - a sketch - and a separate specification of the desired functionality. The synthesizer then completes the sketch to behave like the specification. The correctness of the synthesized implementation is guaranteed by the compiler, which allows, among other benefits, rapid development of highly tuned implementations without the fear of introducing bugs.We develop SKETCH, a language for finite programs with linguistic support for sketching. Finite programs include many highperformance kernels, including cryptocodes. In contrast to prior synthesizers, which had to be equipped with domain-specific rules, SKETCH completes sketches by means of a combinatorial search based on generalized boolean satisfiability. Consequently, our combinatorial synthesizer is complete for the class of finite programs: it is guaranteed to complete any sketch in theory, and in practice has scaled to realistic programming problems.Freed from domain rules, we can now write sketches as simpleto-understand partial programs, which are regular programs in which difficult code fragments are replaced with holes to be filled by the synthesizer. Holes may stand for index expressions, lookup tables, or bitmasks, but the programmer can easily define new kinds of holes using a single versatile synthesis operator.We have used SKETCH to synthesize an efficient implementation of the AES cipher standard. The synthesizer produces the most complex part of the implementation and runs in about an hour.