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Comment by qarl | Hacker News Reader

In my experience - a robust testing harness will get you the safety you need. And most software you describe has such testing.

I think the Bun port is a great example where testing enabled a very successful implementation. (Both the original tests themselves and runtime comparisons to the previous implementation.)

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Testing is an extremely inadequate measure of reliability and robustness.

You understand that robust testing can, should, and often does test directly for reliability and robustness, right?

Yes of course, but you also understand that as Dijkstra said "tests cannot show the absence of bugs."

Tests can show you problems, if you can find them, but they cannot show that there are no problems. Property based testing or fuzzing gets your more coverage, and is a good step, but it is still nothing compared to proving things or understanding how something is built and that it is solid. Testing works towards checking for reliability and robustness, but often it's only 10% (?) of the job.

Well, yes, I understand that testing does not create a provably correct solution. But I'd love to hear the source of your "extremely inadequate" or your "10%" claims. I mean - there is a reason why it's used extensively in software engineering - right? Or don't you see value in that, either?

I'm curious - is there any data on the Bun port error rate? I think that would be very indicative of how successful or not the testing is.

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