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This seems so strange to me in 2021 that perhaps the most widely used OS kernel in the world wouldn’t be aiming to have test coverage, given the billions in val
by quickthrower2 6y ago
This seems so strange to me in 2021 that perhaps the most widely used OS kernel in the world wouldn’t be aiming to have test coverage, given the billions in value obtained from it. I guess this is for legacy reasons, and I know as a dev it’s very hard to add tests to an untested system both practically and psychologically and that’s in a team environment not open source
- londons_explore 6y agoThe Linux kernel is pretty well laid out. There are lots of unit and integration tests that could be usefully run against it with no code changes.
- slver 6y agoI'm fine with that premise: it's strange. But if you think about the implications of this strangeness, it can be equally interpreted as "Linus is playing a dangerous game" or "maybe we've kind of exaggerated the importance of unit tests, seeing Linux is doing fine". Linux doesn't seem to stand out as exceptionally buggy. It has bugs, but then so does every project that's unit tested.
- Retric 6y agoAlternatively, unit tests are simply a poor fit when context is so critical for Linux kernel bugs. In much the way unit tests are really hard to write for concurrency issues. In theory they should still be useful, but in practice perhaps not.