at step 201 a source and target program is received the source program may for example comprise a sequence of characters formatted according to a human readable or u201c high level u201d programming language and semantically arranged to perform one or more functions or tasks when executed in a computing device the target program may comprise for example the corresponding sequence of machine readable bytes generated by compiling the source program in a language compliant compiler the source and target programs may be received in a merging tool or module of a compiler validation application for example at step 203 a plurality of memory references generated by a compiler during a compilation of the source program is also received in the merging tool or module these hints may include for example a layout of data structures in memory additionally for programs containing functions with loops the compiler generated hints may also include mappings between the source program state and target program state at the entry to the loops to validate managed code compilations the computer validation system 100 matches the language semantics of the source program to the language semantics of the target program for example certain source language programs read and write named fields.