And I expect they are right. Trying to test a codebase after the fact never goes well.
[1] With the kind of investment backing they have you'd think they'd be able to reach some kind of licensing deal, but who knows.
Otherwise, I doubt it. They have to write the tests again no matter what. Given that, there is no downside to reimplementing it while they are at it. All while there is a big upside to doing that: Trying to test something after the implementation is already written never ends well.
That does not guarantee that their approach will succeed. It is hard problem no matter how you slice it. But trying to reverse engineer the tests for the C version now that all knowledge of what went into it in the first place is lost is all but guaranteed to fail. Testing after the fact never ends well. Rewriting the implementation and tests in parallel increases the chances of success.
"Stability" is a word that means different things for different use cases.
- no way to merge upstream
- no way to run full test-suit to be sure everything is tiptop
