system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Would spreading sugar on an icy path have the same effect as spreading salt on it?
gpt
Sucrose in anything but nanoparticles dissolves very frustratingly slowly into liquid water at low temperatures, and even slower into ice that it's sitting on the surface of.

That said, sucrose-water solutions do lower the freezing point of the solution, and the saturation of the solution controls the amount of that freezing point depression.

So, granulated sugar onto an icy sidewalk might take hours to work vs. minutes for NaCl. If you poured syrup (a supersaturated solution) onto the ice, it would work pretty quickly meanwhile. Powdered sugar would probably be somewhere in between.