I contributed to Fructose
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: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