Respected creduce dev list member,
I am one of
the enthusiastic fun of the creduce tool. The main reason is that it
helps reduced the test cases automatically, since I am a compiler
developer the test cases which used to reproduce the compiler bug
usually very large, sometimes it goes up to millions of lines after
pre-processing, usually creduce works well if you give it good script
for the interestingness. I would take this opportunity to say sincerely
thank you for the awesome work done, it really means a lot to me and
makes us my life much easier.
As for future improvement for this tool, I have two suggestions from the users point of view.
(1)
We could add a option to let the user set how long the program is
expected to run at most, once that time passed, creduce can kill the
process and treat it as one failed reduce and just continue try
something else. The reason we need this is that sometimes after reducing
the program goes into infinite loop, and creduce never ends, I have to
kill it and rewrite the script and kill the running step after certain
amount of time (using time out) to tell creduce this is a failed
reducing. This is something we can include into the tool, so as to make
the user write simpler invoke script.
(2) Another thing is
more general. According to my experience, this tool doesn't do every
well when the source code has templates in it. I know it is called 'C'
reduce, not for C++, but since it can be used for reducing C++ as well.
We might try to do some improvement in C++ templates handling to make
the tools even better.
Thanks you so much again
for the superb contribution to the community. Hope this tool becomes
better and better and help more users in the future.
Best Regards,
Tony Jiang
Toronto, Canada
Jan 21 2019