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Documents authored by Polikarpova, Nadia

Document
Invited Talk
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ITP.2021.2
Synthesis of Safe Pointer-Manipulating Programs (Invited Talk)

Authors: Nadia Polikarpova

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 193, 12th International Conference on Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP 2021)

Abstract
Low-level pointer-manipulating code is ubiquitous in operating systems, networking stacks, and browsers, which form the backbone of our digital infrastructure. Unfortunately, this code is susceptible to many kinds of bugs, which lead to crashes and security vulnerabilities. A promising approach to eliminating bugs and reducing programmer effort at the same time is to use program synthesis technology to generate provably correct low-level code automatically from high-level specifications. In this talk I will present a program synthesizer SuSLik, which accepts as input a specification written in separation logic, and produces as output a provably correct C program. SuSLik is the first synthesizer capable of generating a wide range of operations on linked data structures (such as singly- and doubly-linked lists, binary trees, and rose trees) without additional hints from the user. It is also the first synthesizer to automatically discover recursive auxiliary functions required for nested data structure traversal. To make this possible, SuSLik relies on a novel proof system - synthetic separation logic - to derive correct-by-construction programs directly from their specifications. Program proofs generated by SuSLik can be automatically translated into three foundational verification frameworks embedded in Coq: Hoare Type Theory (HTT), Iris, and Verified Software Toolchain (VST).
Cite as

Nadia Polikarpova. Synthesis of Safe Pointer-Manipulating Programs (Invited Talk). In 12th International Conference on Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP 2021). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 193, p. 2:1, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2021)

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@InProceedings{polikarpova:LIPIcs.ITP.2021.2,
  author =	{Polikarpova, Nadia},
  title =	{{Synthesis of Safe Pointer-Manipulating Programs}},
  booktitle =	{12th International Conference on Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP 2021)},
  pages =	{2:1--2:1},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-188-7},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2021},
  volume =	{193},
  editor =	{Cohen, Liron and Kaliszyk, Cezary},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITP.2021.2},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-138975},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ITP.2021.2},
  annote =	{Keywords: Program Synthesis, Separation Logic, Proof Search}
}
Document
Artifact
DOI: 10.4230/DARTS.6.2.16
Perfect is the Enemy of Good: Best-Effort Program Synthesis (Artifact)

Authors: Hila Peleg and Nadia Polikarpova

Published in: DARTS, Volume 6, Issue 2, Special Issue of the 34th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2020)

Abstract
Program synthesis promises to help software developers with everyday tasks by generating code snippets automatically from input-output examples and other high-level specifications. The conventional wisdom is that a synthesizer must always satisfy the specification exactly. We conjecture that this all-or-nothing paradigm stands in the way of adopting program synthesis as a developer tool: in practice, the user-written specification often contains errors or is simply too hard for the synthesizer to solve within a reasonable time; in these cases, the user is left with a single over-fitted result or, more often than not, no result at all. In this paper we propose a new program synthesis paradigm we call best-effort program synthesis, where the synthesizer returns a ranked list of partially-valid results, i.e., programs that satisfy some part of the specification. To support this paradigm, we develop best-effort enumeration, a new synthesis algorithm that extends a popular program enumeration technique with the ability to accumulate and return multiple partially-valid results with minimal overhead. We implement this algorithm in a tool called BESTER, and evaluate it on 79 synthesis benchmarks from the literature. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, our evaluation shows that BESTER returns useful results even when the specification is flawed or too hard: i) for all benchmarks with an error in the specification, the top three BESTER results contain the correct solution, and ii) for most hard benchmarks, the top three results contain non-trivial fragments of the correct solution. We also performed an exploratory user study, which confirms our intuition that partially-valid results are useful: the study shows that programmers use the output of the synthesizer for comprehension and often incorporate it into their solutions.
Cite as

Hila Peleg and Nadia Polikarpova. Perfect is the Enemy of Good: Best-Effort Program Synthesis (Artifact). In Special Issue of the 34th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2020). Dagstuhl Artifacts Series (DARTS), Volume 6, Issue 2, pp. 16:1-16:2, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020)

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@Article{peleg_et_al:DARTS.6.2.16,
  author =	{Peleg, Hila and Polikarpova, Nadia},
  title =	{{Perfect is the Enemy of Good: Best-Effort Program Synthesis (Artifact)}},
  pages =	{16:1--16:2},
  journal =	{Dagstuhl Artifacts Series},
  ISSN =	{2509-8195},
  year =	{2020},
  volume =	{6},
  number =	{2},
  editor =	{Peleg, Hila and Polikarpova, Nadia},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/DARTS.6.2.16},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-132136},
  doi =		{10.4230/DARTS.6.2.16},
  annote =	{Keywords: Program Synthesis, Programming by Example}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2020.2
Perfect Is the Enemy of Good: Best-Effort Program Synthesis

Authors: Hila Peleg and Nadia Polikarpova

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 166, 34th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2020)

Abstract
Program synthesis promises to help software developers with everyday tasks by generating code snippets automatically from input-output examples and other high-level specifications. The conventional wisdom is that a synthesizer must always satisfy the specification exactly. We conjecture that this all-or-nothing paradigm stands in the way of adopting program synthesis as a developer tool: in practice, the user-written specification often contains errors or is simply too hard for the synthesizer to solve within a reasonable time; in these cases, the user is left with a single over-fitted result or, more often than not, no result at all. In this paper we propose a new program synthesis paradigm we call best-effort program synthesis, where the synthesizer returns a ranked list of partially-valid results, i.e. programs that satisfy some part of the specification. To support this paradigm, we develop best-effort enumeration, a new synthesis algorithm that extends a popular program enumeration technique with the ability to accumulate and return multiple partially-valid results with minimal overhead. We implement this algorithm in a tool called BESTER, and evaluate it on 79 synthesis benchmarks from the literature. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, our evaluation shows that BESTER returns useful results even when the specification is flawed or too hard: i) for all benchmarks with an error in the specification, the top three BESTER results contain the correct solution, and ii) for most hard benchmarks, the top three results contain non-trivial fragments of the correct solution. We also performed an exploratory user study, which confirms our intuition that partially-valid results are useful: the study shows that programmers use the output of the synthesizer for comprehension and often incorporate it into their solutions.
Cite as

Hila Peleg and Nadia Polikarpova. Perfect Is the Enemy of Good: Best-Effort Program Synthesis. In 34th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 166, pp. 2:1-2:30, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020)

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@InProceedings{peleg_et_al:LIPIcs.ECOOP.2020.2,
  author =	{Peleg, Hila and Polikarpova, Nadia},
  title =	{{Perfect Is the Enemy of Good: Best-Effort Program Synthesis}},
  booktitle =	{34th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2020)},
  pages =	{2:1--2:30},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-154-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2020},
  volume =	{166},
  editor =	{Hirschfeld, Robert and Pape, Tobias},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2020.2},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-131593},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2020.2},
  annote =	{Keywords: Program Synthesis, Programming by Example}
}
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