I get that the author was being sarcastic, but I don't get what purpose they serve other than be obnoxious.
Was the sarcasm the bit about the bracing, when the actual bug has nothing to do with the goto but instead is the missing post-increment (++)?
And the context here is that OpenBSD people were really mad about OpenSSL in the aftermath of Heartbleed. It was around this time they forked it into LibreSSL.
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20210322121923.804433865@linuxfo...
That Wilfried (my boss at the time) got into the CONTRIBUTORS file for that fix is a constant source of amusement ..
Maintaining tests for these sizes of projects is probably quite arduous too. I don't disagree but I still think there are many genuine reasons there are no/not enough tests around this sort of code.
Perhaps property testing, like QuickCheck. I don't think that is exactly TDD.
But I agree with tests and TDD in general.
I've seen a lot of hot garbage for code because people were too busy writing the tests and ignoring the readability and idiomatic norms of the production code they were writing.
It was working perfectly when they was only one user and this is why it was so difficult to debug.