You can use C-Reduce for any language

Re:You can use C-Reduce for any language by dataflow on Wednesday November 27, 2024 @11:50PM (#42262555)

I was wondering the same thing but I guess the key is probably that you don't actually have to do it correctly every time. Just tokenizing based on a few common characteristics (brace pairing, quotes, indentation, newlines, etc.) should let you trim a ton without knowing anything about the language, I imagine?

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?

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Re:You can use C-Reduce for any language by steventhedev on Thursday November 28, 2024 @12:48AM (#42262789)

It's intended to run for producing compiler test cases, so there shouldn't be any code that's actually running.

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

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Re:You can use C-Reduce for any language by summarity on Thursday November 28, 2024 @11:33AM (#42266567)

> Just tokenizing based on a few common characteristics (brace pairing, quotes, indentation, newlines, etc.) should let you trim a ton without knowing anything about the language, I imagine?

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.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMZLBB_BFNg

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