Does clCreateProgramWithSource work?

Nobody in this forum has any control over Altera's decisions, you can open a support request through their support and request this feature.

Still, I am not particularly sure why you even need to use Altera's emulator for this purpose, when you can do the same thing by running the code on a standard CPU/GPU. There is not much of a reason to use Altera's emulator unless you are compiling kernels with channels, since they do not work on CPUs/GPUs. For every other case, you can simply run your kernel on a standard CPU/GPU which will be much faster and will also give you much more accurate emulation of concurrency/parallelism; something that Altera's emulator is not capable of doing.