  Ikenmeyer et al. (JACM'19) proved an unconditional exponential separation
between the hazard-free complexity and (standard) circuit complexity of
explicit functions. This raises the question: which classes of functions permit
efficient hazard-free circuits?
  In this work, we prove that circuit implementations of transducers with small
state space are such a class. A transducer is a finite state machine that
transcribes, symbol by symbol, an input string of length $n$ into an output
string of length $n$. We present a construction that transforms any function
arising from a transducer into an efficient circuit of size $\mathcal{O}(n)$
computing the hazard-free extension of the function. More precisely, given a
transducer with $s$ states, receiving $n$ input symbols encoded by $l$ bits,
and computing $n$ output symbols encoded by $m$ bits, the transducer has a
hazard-free circuit of size $2^{\mathcal{O}(s+\ell)} m n$ and depth
$\mathcal{O}(s\log n + \ell)$; in particular, if $s, \ell,m\in \mathcal{O}(1)$,
size and depth are asymptotically optimal. In light of the strong hardness
results by Ikenmeyer et al. (JACM'19), we consider this a surprising result.
