- tags
- Computer science, Coding
Program synthesis is the task of writing programs automatically for a given tasks. This is widely considered a very hard problem in the general case, as the computational languages we manipulate as human are hard to manipulate “smoothly”.
Compilation is a type of program synthesis where both the source language and the target language are well defined. A compiler is written for a given source language/target language pair and is therefore doing well specified program synthesis. This allows doing complex operations such as code optimization.
General purpose program synthesis would start from a higher level language, more like natural language.