Decompile to understand; recompile to change

• Production code is organised around many shared constraints, not necessarily around the one behaviour someone wants to modify.
• Imagine extracting that behaviour into a small, comprehensible program, changing it, and compiling the result back into the larger system.
• Slicing and semantic analysis help recover the editable view. Codemods and constraints help integrate it. Overlapping behaviours make reintegration hard.
• The programmer works on little programs; the compiler manages the large one. That round trip is the hypothesis worth testing.

• #compilers
• #program-slicing
• #research