One word: search. Most of the traditional compilation pipeline can be expressed using deterministic rewrite rules. Synthesizers of all families generate and con

One word: search. Most of the traditional compilation pipeline can be expressed using deterministic rewrite rules. Synthesizers of all families generate and consider a large number of possibilities. Flipping it around, there's an old joke that "a synthesizer is just a compiler that sometimes doesn't work." But the first thing to learn is that, the deeper you go, the blurrier the lines get. There certainly exists a compiler out there that does more search than a good chunk of things done under the name of synthesis. (Especially because "synthesis" has become a bit of a buzzword in PL circles, and often gets slapped where it doesn't really belong.) I've discussed this briefly before in my blog: http://www.pathsensitive.com/2021/03/why-programmers-shouldnt-learn-theory.html http://www.pathsensitive.com/2021/03/why-programmers-shouldn...