Calvin Wan wrote:

In our current testing environment, we spend a significant amount of
effort crafting end-to-end tests for error conditions that could easily
be captured by unit tests (or we simply forgo some hard-to-setup and
rare error conditions). Unit tests additionally provide stability to the
codebase and can simplify debugging through isolation. Turning parts of
Git into libraries[1] gives us the ability to run unit tests on the
libraries and to write unit tests in C. Writing unit tests in pure C,
rather than with our current shell/test-tool helper setup, simplifies
test setup, simplifies passing data around (no shell-isms required), and
reduces testing runtime by not spawning a separate process for every
test invocation.

I agree unit tests would be very helpful, but they don't need to be written in C.

I sent a RFC patch series [1] attempting to write unit tests, but using Ruby, the
testing framework is less than 100 lines of code, and uses Ruby bindings to use
the C functions.

I think writing everything in C adds a ton of unnecessary complexity for no
gain. In fact some things are simply not possible, like dealing with crashes
without forks.

Modern languages exist for a reason: C isn't the best tool in every situation,
and I believe this is one of them.

Cheers.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/20230502041113.103385-1-felipe.contreras@gmail.com/T/#t (local)

-- 
Felipe Contreras