[abathur]

This is cool, in any case.

TL;DR: DustMite feeds reductions/variations of a data set (like your source code) into an oracle which tests if it satisfies some property. The primary example is reducing your source code to a local minimum that still exhibits some compiler failure.

The article's conclusion notes some other cool uses; my favorites were:

- "reducing a large commit to a minimal diff"

- "reducing a commit list, when git bisect is insufficient due to the problem being introduced across more than any single commit;"

- "reducing a large data set to a minimal one, resulting in the same code coverage, with the purpose of creating a test suite;"

- "if you have complete test coverage, it can be used for reducing the source tree to a minimal tree which includes support for only enabled unittests. This can be used to create a version of a program or library with a test-defined subset of features."