Program synthesis from execution traces and demonstrations

Abstract

In this thesis, we introduce an architecture for programming productivity tools that relies on a database of execution traces. Our database enables a novel user interaction model for a programmer assistant based on short demonstrations of framework usages in applications. By matching the demonstration traces against the complete traces in the database, our system infers the code snippets for the demonstrated feature including the missing set-up steps. We develop techniques for an interactive trace matching process, and evaluate them on a sample of Swing applications. We show that our system synthesizes code for several features of the Eclipse platform from traces of existing Eclipse plug-ins, and that the generated code is comparable in quality to the tutorial code.