jbarnette

Let me make sure I'm understanding you correctly: You're saying that the Linux kernel's ability to easily run arbitrary code when a core dump occurs is fundamental knowledge that all reasonably experienced C programmers (and most HN readers) possess?

Sounds like you're annoyed with these folks for discovering something new (to them) and being excited about it in public. What exactly bothers you about that?

Aaron Patterson (the maintainer of Ruby's mechanize) and I have been working on this on and off for a few years. Take a look at http://github.com/jbarnette/johnson, http://github.com/mynyml/harmony, and http://github.com/mynyml/holygrail to see where things are heading.

This is useful for tightening the feedback loop. Using something like Autotest gives me near-instant feedback on changes I'm making to client-side libraries.

I'll continue to periodically run my tests inside a "real" browser, but I think this sort of headless testing is a real win.

[Disclaimer: I wrote Johnson, so I'm not exactly a disinterested bystander. Edited for repetition.]

If you like playing with stuff like this, Cloudvox (cloudvox.com) is also worth a look. You can write callflows in various languages (including straight up JSON), which makes it very nicely hackable.