One of my weaknesses as a modern programmer is that I don't reallyunderstand how to do test driven development. I understand the basicideas of automated testing and unit testing and so on, and haveused them to reasonable effect every so often; where I fall down isunderstanding how to test things in more advanced and challengingcircumstances.

My current example of this is our ZFS spares handling system. Simplifiedslightly, the core program works by reading state information on all ofthe ZFS pools and their components (some

I have a message for developers, and not the one you might think. Hereis my message:

Sometimes memory allocation failures are not because the system isout of memory .

There is a subset of programmers who do not want to really deal withmemory allocation failures, and to be honest I can't entirely disagreewith them; recovering from memory allocation failures in a complexprogram that also wants to use as little memory as possible is quitenon-trivial and rather contorted. Apart from just exiting on the spot