click-reduce tool #26

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opened 2025-10-23 16:03:40 +02:00 by alexander.nutz · 0 comments

alexander.nutz commented

2025-10-23 16:03:40 +02:00

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a tool that minimizes C code as much as possible, to still trigger a condition, like a optimizer failure for example.

example:
you have a 200 thousand lines of code C project, and some compiler segfaults for some reason.
Now you are not the compiler dev, but still want the bug to be fixed; what should you do?? You can't give the compiler devs all your company's code, and compiler devs can't easily reproduce this....

the solution: automatically reduce the input code and check that it still triggers the same compile failure.

this is a very common thing in compilers, so there are many existing tools for doing that, like:

mlir-reduce
llvm-reduce
spirv-reduce
....

but we want a tool that operates on C code directly

existing alternatives for C:

creduce: depends on a specific older llvm version, which is ehhr

how this will work:

there will be many ways for how to reduce a program, for example:
- remove whole statements
- replace variables usages with 0
- replace expressions with 0
- remove a switch case#
then there will be an algorithm which applies some of these and runs a user provided program and checks if the conditions are still met, if yes, continue reducing, if no, go back to previous program

a tool that minimizes C code as much as possible, to still trigger a condition, like a optimizer failure for example. example: you have a 200 thousand lines of code C project, and some compiler segfaults for some reason. Now you are not the compiler dev, but still want the bug to be fixed; what should you do?? You can't give the compiler devs all your company's code, and compiler devs can't easily reproduce this.... the solution: automatically reduce the input code and check that it still triggers the same compile failure. this is a very common thing in compilers, so there are many existing tools for doing that, like: - mlir-reduce - llvm-reduce - spirv-reduce - .... but we want a tool that operates on C code directly existing alternatives for C: - `creduce`: depends on a specific older llvm version, which is ehhr how this will work: - there will be many ways for how to reduce a program, for example: - remove whole statements - replace variables usages with 0 - replace expressions with 0 - remove a switch case# - then there will be an algorithm which applies some of these and runs a user provided program and checks if the conditions are still met, if yes, continue reducing, if no, go back to previous program

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click-project/click#26

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