Code Shrinker

[WilliamDue]

It would be great if Futhark had a tool like C-Reduce, where the tool tries to shrink a program as much as possible while having it still fulfill a property. I am specifically interested in the ability to find a minimal programs which still produce an internal compiler error.

[FluxusMagna]

I think a good start, that would already be quite useful is a program that concatenates all dependencies and removes all code not used by a function. Especially when working with code spread out over many files, just getting a single file example to reproduce an error can be a chore.

[athas]

I used to be quite interested in a shrinker. I still am; but I have a strong suspicion that agentic AI is very effective at performing this work as well, since the procedure is largely mechanical (make bindings unused, then remove them), and there is a 100% reliable way of verifying the work (run the compiler).

I am thus reluctant to personally investing a lot of effort into this unless we can show that it is worth it over just using an LLM.

[WilliamDue]

My experience is LLMs are pretty good at it but I still think it would be nice to have a simpler and faster tool to do code shrinking, it feels a bit overkill to use an LLM for something that is a straight forward task. I hope we could get a student to do it as project maybe.

[melsman]

I initiated a draft note a while back about type-safe systematic shrinking... Maybe it can serve as inspiration - after all, Futhark is a type-safe language... The content was SML - shrinking SML in SML... ;)

shrink.pdf