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