In one example, a system for modifying applications to support incremental checkpoints can include logic to generate a dominator tree based on a control flow graph for source code, wherein the control flow graph and the dominator tree comprise a plurality of nodes corresponding to basic blocks of the source code. The processor can select a region based on a leaf node of the dominator tree, the region based on an instruction threshold, and insert a first set of commit instructions into the source code based on entry points into the region and insert a second set of commit instructions into the source code based on exit points from the region. The processor can update the dominator tree to exclude the selected region and compile the source code into an executable application, wherein the first set of commit instructions and the second set of commit instructions enable incremental checkpoints.