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Building Code Transpilers for Domain-Specific Languages Using Program Synthesis (Experience Paper)

Authors Sahil Bhatia, Sumer Kohli, Sanjit A. Seshia, Alvin Cheung

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Author Details

Sahil Bhatia
  • University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Sumer Kohli
  • University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Sanjit A. Seshia
  • University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Alvin Cheung
  • University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Funding

This work was supported in part by a Google BAIR Commons project, by the DARPA LOGiCS project, by the NSF FMitF-1837132, IIS-1955488, IIS-2027575, CCF-1723352, ARO W911NF2110339, ONR N00014-21-1-2724, and DOE award DE-SC0016260.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Shadaj Laddad, Maaz Ahmad and anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback.

Cite As Get BibTex

Sahil Bhatia, Sumer Kohli, Sanjit A. Seshia, and Alvin Cheung. Building Code Transpilers for Domain-Specific Languages Using Program Synthesis (Experience Paper). In 37th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 263, pp. 38:1-38:30, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.38

Abstract

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are prevalent across many application domains. Such languages let developers easily express computations using high-level abstractions that result in performant implementations. To leverage DSLs, however, application developers need to master the DSL’s syntax and manually rewrite existing code. Compilers can aid in this effort, but part of building a compiler requires transpiling code from the source code to the target DSL. Such transpilation is typically done via pattern-matching rules on the source code. Sadly, developing such rules is often a painstaking and error-prone process. 
In this paper, we describe our experience in using program synthesis to build code transpilers. To do so, we developed MetaLift, a new framework for building transpilers that transform general-purpose code into DSLs using program synthesis. To use MetaLift, transpiler developers first define the target DSL’s semantics using MetaLift’s specification language, and specify the search space for each input code fragment to be transpiled using MetaLift’s API. MetaLift then leverages program synthesizers and theorem provers to automatically find transpilations expressed in the target DSL that is provably semantic equivalent to the input code. We have used MetaLift to build three DSL transpilers targeting different programming models and application domains. Our results show that the MetaLift-based compilers can translate many benchmarks used in prior work created by specialized implementations, but can be built using orders-of-magnitude fewer lines of code as compared to prior work.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Compilers
Keywords
  • Program Synthesis
  • Code Transpilation
  • DSLs
  • Verification

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