That's very relevant to generate-and-test program search. The SBSE (search-based software engineering) and APR (automated program repair) communities do that k

That's very relevant to generate-and-test program search. The SBSE (search-based software engineering) and APR (automated program repair) communities do that kind of stuff. E.g.: There's a paper from that world, which I can't presently find, on "super mutants": basically, use environmental variables as feature flags so that you can compile 100 variants at once. Back when I worked in this space, one of the best things I did was run the Java compiler from within nailgun (program that saves JVM startup time) to compile mutants faster. Symbolic program synthesis doesn't work like this. They effectively has its own compiler toolchain that transform programs into constraint systems and/or do partial evaluation of programs with wholes. Most of them never run a traditional compiler; they just guarantee that they output correct code.