[mitchellh]

For those who don't know: this is PROBABLY named after Palm OS Gremlins. Palm OS had a debugging tool called "gremlins" that would randomly tap and type and gesture all over your Palm OS app. This debugging tool would often find edge cases that would end up crashing your app.

As someone who used to program for Palm OS a lot, I was pretty happy to see this name. :)

[apinstein]

Back in the very early days of Palm OS, Palm had a "Quality Certification" you could apply for, and if your app passed, you'd get a bunch of marketing benefits. So we went for the highest-level certification on our products, which required surviving 1,000,000 gremlins.

At first I was very skeptical that it would find any meaningful bugs, but in fact it was very good at finding memory leaks and edge cases. In the end it took us several weeks to finally be able to survive the 1M gremlins without a crash. A single run of 1M gremlins would take about 24 hours.

In later years they added the capability to supply your own dictionary of values to apply to certain inputs so that gremlins could get past validation, and it would also save the entire state of the device every 10K events so that you could easily reproduce errors that Gremlins found.

I could definitely see this as a good way to stress-test certain parts of your app, though it takes a ton of time, and frankly without surrounding tooling (like resource monitoring, saving "state") it wouldn't be practical.

[fzaninotto]

As the author of this lib, I can confirm: it was named after the movie.

[Semaphor]

Or even more probable, they are both simply named after Gremlins [0]

[0]: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=gremlin