I see in the Salsa20 specification there are test examples throughout the document to help an implementer make sure every function works as designed. Consequently the whole algorithm would work perfectly if all the tests pass. Without these test vectors it would be very difficult to know whether the code was working as designed or was giving incorrect outputs. Test-driven development should be the gold standard for developing a cryptographic library.
So it came as a surprise to me when reading the improved ChaCha20 specification that there are no test examples to validate against. I have even had a look on the ChaCha web page but found nothing.
Even though ChaCha20 has better diffusion and is supposedly more secure, I would consider myself actually safer using the Salsa20 algorithm as I have reference test vectors for the code/library to validate against and I would know for sure that it was implemented correctly. Using ChaCha20 would be a risky move in comparison. How do all the other implementers of ChaCha20 e.g. OpenSSH know their implementation is correct? How are other people able to trust that their implementation is correct?
I would like to know where the ChaCha20 test examples are which show the correct outputs from the ChaCha quarter-round and ChaCha matrix? Why aren't they in the specification document?
