A paper by the authors John Regehr et al. from 2012 explaining how it works https://fsl.cs.illinois.edu/publications/regehr-chen-cuoq-ei....
It seems like a small number of the passes are not specific to C:
https://github.com/csmith-project/creduce/blob/master/creduc...
`"C" => 1,` means it is only for C.
I would guess `pass_lines` is the most important for non-C code; I'm guessing (it's written in unreadable Perl) that it removes lines.
So while it can work for languages other than C, most of its features are C-specific so it's not going to work nearly as well. Still I'd never heard of C-Reduce; pretty cool tool!
Someone make one based on Tree Sitter, quick!
My real worry is what if this ends up running dangerous code. Like what if you have a disabled line that writes instead of reading, that randomly gets reactivated?
CPython includes a flag to only run parsing/compiling to bytecode. While you can use it like they did here and run the code - it really depends on how much you trust every possible subset of your code
Yep, here's an explanation from a related tool, which was spawned by the parser-parser-combinator[0] approach to syntactical analysis and transformation: https://comby.dev/blog/2021/03/26/comby-reducer - which is based on what you've said.
Most of the non-domain specific reductions in C-Reduce is simply brute force IIRC.