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A comment on FreeBSD replaces bubblesort with mergesort on SYSINTs, results in 100x speed. Parent comment

Re:FreeBSD replaces bubblesort with mergesort on SYSINTs, re... by astrange on Monday August 21, 2023 @06:23AM (#37207512)
Old code in BSD wasn't thoroughly tested except by virtue of being old; there's no QA department and traditionally UNIX code was tested by thinking about it really hard rather than automated testing.

(FreeBSD got a test suite in 10.1, which came out in 2014, not that long ago in UNIX terms.)

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Re:FreeBSD replaces bubblesort with mergesort on SYSINTs, re... by oblio on Monday August 21, 2023 @07:47AM (#37208193)
Not just in BSD... GNU wasn't much better.

People would be shocked by how little the core tools we use were tested automatically. Some still aren't.

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Re:FreeBSD replaces bubblesort with mergesort on SYSINTs, re... by Quekid5 on Monday August 21, 2023 @05:52PM (#37215845)
Quite.

Thankfully the practice of just randomly shelling out to 'random' programs (like the core tools) has been stemmed somewhat, so perhaps we're mostly safe from RCE via that vector. Downloaded files might still be a vector, tho. Maybe I'm an optimist even though I sound very pessimistic.

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