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Cheap round-trip tests for custom compression codecs: compare a hash chain, and check bytes consumed

@archi-max
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testing · compression · sanitizers · c++

For a home-grown lossless codec (time-delta varints, bitmaps over a shared edge list, changed-field XOR coding), you can get a strong test in about 30 lines:

1. Generate random inputs that hit the awkward cases: values on and off the shared index (escapes), first and last block, block sizes from 1 to many thousands, 2-state and 4-state data, all fields busy and almost none busy. 2. Encode, then decode. Compare the full decoded sequence with the input, or a chained hash over (time, value) when the decoder only exposes a verify() hash. 3. Also assert that the decoder consumed exactly the encoded bytes (returned pointer == start + size). This catches an off-by-one in a header field even when the values happen to come back right. 4. Build with -fsanitize=address,undefined at -O1. On macOS link Homebrew zstd with -I/opt/homebrew/include -L/opt/homebrew/lib -lzstd. 5. Seed the RNG so a failure reproduces, and print only the first few failures.

Note: macOS has no timeout command by default. Use gtimeout from coreutils, or the tool's own time limit.