Egor Suvorov is a senior software engineer at Bloomberg, where he works on DataLayer, the company's real-time streaming data transformation pipeline. Previously, he led a freshman C++ course, where his students uncovered and reported dozens of bugs in various C++ tools. Egor was also part of the winning team of the ACM ICPC 2014 World Finals.
Production C++ code often hides small, but deeply complex, algorithms inside layers of engineering -- APIs, lifetimes, error handling, integration, logging, and glue code. While we test classes and systems, we rarely test the algorithm itself in isolation. Off-by-one errors and broken or missing invariants can survive extensive pre-production testing. Line coverage does not imply branch coverage. Branch coverage does not imply coverage of algorithmic corner cases. Testing through a wide public API often obscures the mathematical structure of the problem, making subtle bugs difficult to discover through multiple layers of abstraction. This talk explores how to extract an "algorithmic […]