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by latchkey 1267 days ago
> Time taken for tests has never really been something I've seen anyone care about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

It is an absolute quality of life issue for development. The longer tests take to run, the more loathe developers are to write and work with them. The worst is when developers start to add calls to `sleep()` in order to make async tests work properly... it just balloons out of there and becomes an extremely brittle test suite.

1 comments

Setting aside the egotistical link to misused philosophical point (I specifically did not say no one cares about it, nor did I assert I've never seen someone who does care about it), the major bottleneck for most software has always been dependency resolution and build time (which might include running tests).

HN has been chock full of blogs for years from big and small firms that talk about how they sped up the build process. Updating hardware, compilers, architecture refactoring etc, compilers and adding optimization flags could affect the run time of a test, outside of one that literally has some `sleep(...)` call in it, in which case this report is also fairly useless.