[JoachimSchipper]

Minisat is designed to elucidate; consider reading the paper and implementation - it's actually a very fast solver.

As to compilers: one interesting idea is the "superoptimizer". In its basic form, try all byte sequences and use a solver to filter out the ones that do what you want when executed; then pick the fastest. Regehr has an interesting blog post on this topic.

[fabriceleal]

Minisat is definitely on my read list; I'll probably need to read it 2/3 times to fully appreciate it's content. Thanks for the "superoptimizer" pointer, I'll explore that.