I gave a short talk about program synthesis at !!Con West this year titled “Writing Programs! That Write Other Progams!!” Here’s the abstract for the talk:

Why write programs when you can write a program to write programs for you? And that program writes programs that are faster than the programs you’d write by hand. And that program’s programs are actually, you know, correct. Wow!

Yep, it’s time to synthesize. But this ain’t Moog, this is program synthesis. What is that, and how can it upgrade our optimizers into super-optimizers? We’ll find out!!

The talk was a short, friendly introduction to the same stuff I wrote about in Synthesizing Loop-Free Programs with Rust and Z3.

The recording of the talk is embedded below. The presentation slides are available here.

Also make sure to also check out all the other talks from !!Con West 2020! !!Con West (and !!Con East) is a really special conference about the joy, surprise, and excitement of programming. It’s the anti-burnout conference: remembering all the fun and playfulness of programming, and embracing absurdist side projects because why not?! I love it, and I highly encourage you to come next year.