Yes, I think we can implement this. My concern is that searching only
the first program point where a wrong value is taken might not always
lead to optimal output. For example, we may get a smaller reduced
program by keeping the second failing point. In other words, we could
lose other search paths if we only focus on the first failing point.
On the other hand, this early-abort strategy could serve as a
trade-off
between reduction speed and reduction rate. More importantly, we will
never know if we don't give it a shot :)
Yeah, I'm not sure if I've thought it through very well yet, but it's
worth trying, and also the conversion from a printf-style output to
calling abort() on wrong code is something that Zhendong Su and his
people do manually, so it is perhaps useful on its own.
John