In the article she indicates it was for proving her hypothesis regarding the source of the problem. She then sent an actual patch upstream to fix it. It was fas

In the article she indicates it was for proving her hypothesis regarding the source of the problem. She then sent an actual patch upstream to fix it. It was faster this way because of the way the binary did bitwise flags for options. Flipping a single bit in the binary was quicker than recompiling bit twiddling code to for testing purposes.