15 or so years ago now - before I worked professionally really - I worked with Common Lisp to create a little toy tool to build, essentially, ASTs and evolve them to achieve a given fitness function. It was a heavily studied topic in the 1995-2005 timeframe at my alma mater. I just uploaded it ( https://github.com/pnathan/z-system ) as an amusing bit.

I'd be curious if the OP has looked at the literature on evolutionary programs (not evo algos, but programs).

I love this idea, it's thought provoking and I want to play

Is there a repository of examples or experiments built with Zyme? Curious to see what has been explored so far

I think it could be fun to focus on visual experiments; shader-like programs as a way to easily explore different outputs

Is source available for zyme? I don't see anything on that page about how one might download and install their compiler.

Interesting. I haven't seen much in this space since Lee Spector's "push" more than 20 years ago (http://faculty.hampshire.edu/lspector/push.html). I did see a mention of Push in the FAQ but it would be very interesting to compare this in detail. If I get it correctly Zyme programs are evolved on the bytecode level whereas Push's stack architecture is designed to be evolvable directly at the syntactic level? A head-to-head comparison / benchmark would be super interesting.

"While I've observed bloat in Zyme, I don’t think this is driving the increase in mutation resistance and survival rate" This is evident in the human genome.