Lenses are programs that can be run both “front to back” and “back to front,” allowing updates to either their source or their target data to be transferred in both directions. Since their introduction by Foster et al., lenses have been extensively studied, extended, and applied. Recent work has also demonstrated how techniques from type-directed program synthesis can be used to efficiently synthesize a simple class of lenses—so-called bijective lenses over string data—given a pair of types (regular expressions) and a small number of examples.
We extend this synthesis algorithm to a much broader class of lenses, called simple symmetric lenses, including all bijective lenses, all of the popular category of “asymmetric” lenses, and a rich subset of the more powerful “symmetric lenses” proposed by Hofmann et al. Intuitively, simple symmetric lenses allow some information to be present on one side but not the other and vice versa. They are of independent theoretical interest, being the largest class of symmetric lenses that do not rely on persistent internal state.
Synthesizing simple symmetric lenses is substantially more challenging than synthesizing bijective lenses: Since some of the information on each side can be “disconnected” from the other side, there will, in general, be many lenses that agree with a given example. To guide the search process, we use stochastic regular expressions and ideas from information theory to estimate the amount of information propagated by a candidate lens, generally preferring lenses that propagate more information, as well as user annotations marking parts of the source and target data structures as either irrelevant or essential.
We describe an implementation of simple symmetric lenses and our synthesis procedure as extensions to the Boomerang language. We evaluate its performance on 48 benchmark examples drawn from Flash Fill, Augeas, the bidirectional programming literature, and electronic file format synchronization tasks. Our implementation can synthesize each of these lenses in under 30 seconds.
Tue 20 AugDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
10:30 - 12:00 | Program Analysis & SynthesisResearch Papers at Aurora Borealis Chair(s): Daniel Winograd-Cort Target Corp | ||
10:30 22mTalk | Relational Cost Analysis for Functional-Imperative Programs Research Papers Weihao Qu University at Buffalo, SUNY, Marco Gaboardi University at Buffalo, SUNY, Deepak Garg Max Planck Institute for Software Systems | ||
10:52 22mTalk | Fuzzi: A Three-Level Logic for Differential Privacy Research Papers Hengchu Zhang University of Pennsylvania, Edo Roth University of Pennsylvania, Andreas Haeberlen University of Pennsylvania, USA, Benjamin C. Pierce University of Pennsylvania, Aaron Roth University of Pennsylvania, USA | ||
11:15 22mTalk | Synthesizing Differentially Private Programs Research Papers | ||
11:37 22mTalk | Synthesizing Symmetric Lenses Research Papers Anders Miltner Princeton University, Solomon Maina University of Pennsylvania, Kathleen Fisher Tufts University, USA, Benjamin C. Pierce University of Pennsylvania, David Walker Princeton University, Steve Zdancewic University of Pennsylvania Pre-print | ||