How SQLite is tested

No less impressive than the SQLite project itself; especially 100% branch coverage! That's really hard to pull off and especially to maintain as the development continues.

Based on the stability track record, I was more curious about how SQLite has done the anomaly testing. Sadly, the article has just a few words about it.

Truly one of the best software products! It is used on every single device, and it is just pure rock-solid.

This looks so very cool, and so then all the more thought provoking that the tests themselves are closed-source, unlike the rest of the codebase. In this evolving world of rapidly improving llm coding agent productivity, the idea that the tests are more important than the implementation starts to ring true.

I was thinking about sqlite's test landscape as described here, in relation to simonw's recent writing about porting/recreating the justHTML engine from python to js via codex, nearly "automatically" with just a prompt and light steering.

Over a decade ago, the maintainer of SQLite gave a talk at OSCON about their testing practices. One concept that stood out to me was the power of checklists, the same tool pilots rely on before every flight.

He also mentioned Doctors Without Borders, who weren't seeing the outcomes they expected when it came to saving lives. One surprising reason? The medical teams often didn't speak the same language or even know each other's names.

The solution was simple: a pre-surgery checklist. Before any procedure, team members would state their name and role. This small ritual dramatically improved their success rates, not through better technique, but through better communication.

https://sqlite.org/src/ext/checklist/3070700/index

This one is probably popping today because of the simonw post yesterday about using an LLM to basically one-shot port a lib across languages with the help of an extremely robust test suite