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comparison content/Coding/004-fructose-contrib.rst @ 4:7ce6393e6d30
Adding converted blog posts from old blog.
| author | Brian Neal <bgneal@gmail.com> |
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| date | Thu, 30 Jan 2014 21:45:03 -0600 |
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| 3:c3115da3ff73 | 4:7ce6393e6d30 |
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| 1 I contributed to Fructose | |
| 2 ######################### | |
| 3 | |
| 4 :date: 2011-05-31 21:40 | |
| 5 :tags: Fructose, C++, Python, UnitTesting | |
| 6 :slug: i-contributed-to-fructose | |
| 7 :author: Brian Neal | |
| 8 | |
| 9 At work we started using CxxTest_ as our unit testing framework. We like it because | |
| 10 it is very light-weight and easy to use. We've gotten a tremendous amount of benefit | |
| 11 from using a unit testing framework, much more than I had ever imagined. We now have | |
| 12 almost 700 tests, and I cannot imagine going back to the days of no unit tests or ad-hoc | |
| 13 testing. It is incredibly reassuring to see all the tests pass after making a significant | |
| 14 change to the code base. There is no doubt in my mind that our software-hardware integration | |
| 15 phases have gone much smoother thanks to our unit tests. | |
| 16 | |
| 17 Sadly it seems CxxTest is no longer actively supported. However this is not of great | |
| 18 concern to us. The code is so small we are fairly confident we could tweak it if necessary. | |
| 19 | |
| 20 I recently discovered Fructose_, a unit testing framework written by Andrew Marlow. It too | |
| 21 has similar goals of being small and simple to use. One thing I noticed that CxxTest had that | |
| 22 Fructose did not was a Python code generator that took care of creating the ``main()`` function | |
| 23 and registering all the tests with the framework. Since C++ has very little introspection | |
| 24 capabilities, C++ unit testing frameworks have historically laid the burden of registering | |
| 25 tests on the programmer. Some use macros to help with this chore, but littering your code | |
| 26 with ugly macros makes tests annoying to write. And if anything, you want your tests to be | |
| 27 easy to write so your colleagues will write lots of tests. CxxTest approached this problem by | |
| 28 providing first a Perl script, then later a Python script, to automate this part of the process. | |
| 29 | |
| 30 I decided it would be interesting to see if I could provide such a script for Fructose. After | |
| 31 a Saturday of hacking, I'm happy to say Andrew has accepted the script and it now ships with | |
| 32 Fructose version 1.1.0. I hope to improve the script to not only run all the tests but to also | |
| 33 print out a summary of the number of tests that passed and failed at the end, much like CxxTest does. | |
| 34 This will require some changes to the C++ code. Also on my wish list is to make the script | |
| 35 extensible, so that others can easily change the output and code generation to suit their needs. | |
| 36 | |
| 37 I've hosted the code for the Python script, which I call ``fructose_gen.py`` on Bitbucket_. | |
| 38 Feedback is greatly appreciated. | |
| 39 | |
| 40 .. _CxxTest: http://cxxtest.tigris.org/ | |
| 41 .. _Fructose: http://fructose.sourceforge.net/ | |
| 42 .. _Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/bgneal/fructose_gen/src |