CodeHint: Dynamic and Interactive Synthesis of Code Snippets

There are many tools that help programmers find code frag-ments, but most are inexpressive and rely on static infor-mation. We present a new technique for synthesizing code that is dynamic (giving accurate results and allowing pro-grammers to reason about concrete executions), easy-to-use (supporting a wide range of correctness specifications), and interactive (allowing users to refine the candidate code snip-pets). Our implementation, which we call CodeHint, gener-ates and evaluates code at runtime and hence can synthe-size real-world Java code that involves I/O, reflection, na-tive calls, and other advanced language features. We have evaluated CodeHint in two user studies and show that its algorithms are efficient and that it improves programmer productivity by more than a factor of two