You can use C-Reduce for any language

C-Reduce is a tool by Regehr and friends for minimizing C compiler bug reproducers. Imagine if you had a 10,000 line long C file that triggered a Clang bug. You don’t want to send a massive blob to the compiler developers because that’s unhelpful, but you also don’t want to cut it down to size by hand. The good news is that C-Reduce can do that for you. The bad news is that everyone thinks it only works for C.

It’s pretty widely applicable. You only need:

• A deterministic condition¹
• A reasonably quick reproducer (it helps with the speed of the reduction)
• One or more mutable source files for C-Reduce to cut down

I ran into a bug with RustPython running scrapscript and wanted to report it. So I ran wrote a script interesting.sh to reproduce the bug:

#!/bin/bash
# No -o pipefail; we don't want rustpython failures to cause the script to fail
set -eu

# Note the absolute path to the binary, which is not in $PATH
/path/to/RustPython/target/release/rustpython scrapscript.py 2>&1 | grep \
    "tried to push value onto stack but overflowed max_stackdepth"

And then I ran C-Reduce. This all happened within a couple of seconds:

$ creduce --not-c interesting.sh scrapscript.py
===< 2263604 >===
running 4 interestingness tests in parallel
===< pass_blank :: 0 >===
(0.5 %, 200799 bytes)
(0.6 %, 200607 bytes)
===< pass_lines :: 0 >===
(9.2 %, 183225 bytes)
(18.1 %, 165228 bytes)
(26.5 %, 148382 bytes)
(29.3 %, 142674 bytes)
(34.6 %, 131961 bytes)
(38.1 %, 124960 bytes)
(40.6 %, 119872 bytes)
(42.3 %, 116504 bytes)
(44.4 %, 112161 bytes)
(46.4 %, 108180 bytes)
(47.5 %, 105950 bytes)
...

What you see is C-Reduce cutting down the file by 50% nearly instantly… and I don’t even have a very fast computer.

We use --not-c because otherwise C-Reduce uses a bunch of C-specific passes. If we’re working on Python, it will likely just slow things down (but not materially change the outcome).

There you have it. Fast and easy. As I finish typing these next couple of sentences, we’re already at 96.9% reduced.