There are automated checks which can help enforce correctness of the parts of the code that are being checked. For example, we could imagine a check that says “when I add a sprite to the list of assets, then the list of assets becomes one item longer than it was before”. And if I wrote code that had a bug here, the automated check would catch it and show the problem without any humans needing to take the time.
But since code can do whatever you write it to do, there’s always human review needed. If I wrote code so that adding a sprite also sent a single message to my enemy’s Minecraft server then it’s not going to fail any tests or show up anywhere, but we need humans to look at the code and see that I’m trying to turn other developers into a DDoS engine.
As others replied, you could choose to find and run someone’s branch. This actually does happen with open-source projects: the original author disappears or abandons the project, other people want changes, and someone says “hey I have a copy of the project but with all those changes you want” and we all end up using that fork instead.
But as a tool for evaluating code that’ll get merged, it does not work. Imagine you want to check out the new bleeding-edge version of Godot. There’s currently ~4700 possible bleeding-edge versions, so which one will you use? You can’t do this organically.
Most big projects do have something like beta releases. The humans decide what code changes to merge and they do all that and produce a new godot-beta. The people who want to test out the latest stuff use that and report problems which get fixed before they finally release the finished version to the public. But they could never just merge in random crap and then see if it was a good idea afterward.
There are automated checks which can help enforce correctness of the parts of the code that are being checked. For example, we could imagine a check that says “when I add a sprite to the list of assets, then the list of assets becomes one item longer than it was before”. And if I wrote code that had a bug here, the automated check would catch it and show the problem without any humans needing to take the time.
But since code can do whatever you write it to do, there’s always human review needed. If I wrote code so that adding a sprite also sent a single message to my enemy’s Minecraft server then it’s not going to fail any tests or show up anywhere, but we need humans to look at the code and see that I’m trying to turn other developers into a DDoS engine.
As others replied, you could choose to find and run someone’s branch. This actually does happen with open-source projects: the original author disappears or abandons the project, other people want changes, and someone says “hey I have a copy of the project but with all those changes you want” and we all end up using that fork instead.
But as a tool for evaluating code that’ll get merged, it does not work. Imagine you want to check out the new bleeding-edge version of Godot. There’s currently ~4700 possible bleeding-edge versions, so which one will you use? You can’t do this organically.
Most big projects do have something like beta releases. The humans decide what code changes to merge and they do all that and produce a new godot-beta. The people who want to test out the latest stuff use that and report problems which get fixed before they finally release the finished version to the public. But they could never just merge in random crap and then see if it was a good idea afterward.