I use AFL (American Fuzzy Lop) on TXR from time to time.
And, guess what, there was also a problem with nested backquotes. Backquote is spelled ^ (caret) in TXR Lisp, so the cases that were triggering the degenerate behavior had ^^^^^^^ rather than ```````...
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2017-07/msg...