Synthesizing data structure manipulations from storyboards

  • Authors:

  • Rishabh Singh;Armando Solar-Lezama

  • Affiliations:

  • MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA;MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT symposium and the 13th European conference on Foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We present the Storyboard Programming framework, a new synthesis system designed to help programmers write imperative low-level data-structure manipulations. The goal of this system is to bridge the gap between the "boxes-and-arrows" diagrams that programmers often use to think about data-structure manipulation algorithms and the low-level imperative code that implements them. The system takes as input a set of partial input-output examples, as well as a description of the high-level structure of the desired solution. From this information, it is able to synthesize low-level imperative implementations in a matter of minutes. The framework is based on a new approach for combining constraint-based synthesis and abstract-interpretation-based shape analysis. The approach works by encoding both the synthesis and the abstract interpretation problem as a constraint satisfaction problem whose solution defines the desired low-level implementation. We have used the framework to synthesize several data-structure manipulations involving linked lists and binary search trees, as well as an insertion operation into an And Inverter Graph.