Guided by the Beauty of Our Test Suite: A Story of Rust, Uxn, and Rigorous Engineering
Last summer, the author released Raven, an independent implementation of the Uxn CPU and Varavara orchestrator. Recently, to improve stability and performance, the author built a robust testing infrastructure, including GitHub Actions CI, snapshot testing, static panic prevention, and fuzzing. This post details challenges and solutions encountered while building these tests, such as issues with the reliability of GitHub Actions' Windows and ARM runners, and pitfalls in statically proving the absence of panics and in fuzz testing. The author successfully improved Raven's performance and reliability, ensuring cross-platform portability. The journey highlights the power of Rust, cargo-fuzz, and even (sigh) GitHub Actions in creating robust and correct systems.