[LLVMdev] [Patch] Adding unit tests to LLVM

[Misha Brukman]

2008/12/27 Mark Kromis <greybird at mac.com>

> Just a curiosity question, why push for gtest vs Boost Test or
> a different test suite?
> I normally use Boost, and their test suite, so I'm more familiar with that.
> So I was wondering is one better then the other, or is it just that someone
> makes a patch for it?
>

I looked more into Boost.Test to see what's in it.  Boost.Test doesn't seem
to be stand-alone -- I don't see a way to use Boost.Test without importing
some other chunks of Boost that the testing library depends on.  While Boost
is a fine set of libraries, I don't think we want to increase the LLVM
distribution by sizeof(Boost) just to enable unittesting, nor do we want to
spend the time on maintaining a subset of Boost that's "just enough" to
build and use the unittest library, along a modified configure/build process
that Boost wants to use (Boost.Build? Boost.Jam?).

Boost also seems to want to use exceptions, and LLVM does not want to.  I'm
not sure if there would be some difficulties in running a build where some
libraries are compiled with no exceptions, some with, and the results are
linked together.  At the best case, it would complicate our build system to
be able to support different set of flags for building LLVM libraries vs.
Boost.Test (and the rest of Boost that we import).

Sample usage of Boost.Test:
http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/trunk/libs/test/example/unit_test_example_12.cpp
Note the code at the end setting up the test suite -- this is boilerplate
code that I think shouldn't be necessary to setup and run tests.

Google Test, on the other hand, has no external dependencies, and is
distributed as a dozen of .h/.cc files; supports Makefile, SCons, and Xcode;
and doesn't use exceptions or RTTI.

Sample usage of GTest:
http://code.google.com/p/googletest/source/browse/trunk/samples/sample5_unittest.cc
GTest-specific LOC besides the #include statement: 0.

Note that I'm not counting main() for either Boost or GTest, because both
provide a standard main() for use with almost all test files.

Misha
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20081227/eeff2436/attachment.html>