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A steam locomotive from 1993 broke my yarn test

Blog post from Cloudflare

Post Details
Company
Date Published
Author
Yew Leong
Word Count
3,612
Language
English
Hacker News Points
169
Summary

The author of the text was trying to run a test suite for their internal Cloudflare instance using `yarn test`, but it kept hanging and eventually crashing after approximately 27 seconds. The problem was caused by Jest, a JavaScript testing framework, running a command called `sl` (which is actually a fun little joke program from 1993) multiple times in parallel. The `sl` command is responsible for creating an animated steam locomotive that chugs through the terminal. The author noticed that the `sl` command was being run 4 times concurrently by Jest, which took around 6.7 seconds to complete each time. This meant that the total execution time of the 4 concurrent commands would be around 27 seconds, causing the test suite to hang and eventually crash. The issue was resolved when the author renamed the `sl` command to something else, effectively removing the naming clash between Jest's `sl` and the joke program.