There are many tools that help programmers find code fragments, but most are inexpressive and rely on static information. We present a new technique for synthesizing code that is dynamic (giving accurate results and allowing programmers to reason about concrete executions), easy-to-use (supporting a wide range of correctness specifications), and interactive (allowing users to refine the candidate code snippets). Our implementation, which we call CodeHint, generates and evaluates code at runtime and hence can synthesize real-world Java code that involves I/O, reflection, native 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.

Garbage collection is widely used and has largely been a boon for programmer productivity. However, traditional garbage collection is approaching both practical and theoretical performance limits. In practice, the maximum heap size and heap structure of large applications are influenced as much by garbage collector behavior as by resource availability.

GPUs have become part of most commodity systems. Nonetheless, they are often underutilized when not executing graphics-intensive or special-purpose numerical computations, which are rare in consumer workloads. Emerging architectures, such as integrated CPU/GPU combinations, may create an opportunity to utilize these otherwise unused cycles for offloading traditional systems tasks. Garbage collection appears to be a particularly promising candidate for offloading, due to the popularity of managed languages on consumer devices.