[Lldb-commits] [PATCH] D32930: New framework for lldb client-server communication tests.

[Zachary Turner via Phabricator via lldb-commits]

zturner added a comment.

In https://reviews.llvm.org/D32930#767820, @beanz wrote:

> One small comment below. In general I agree with the thoughts here, and I think that this is a huge step forward for testing the debug server components.
>
> I also agree with Zachary in principal that it would be nice to come up with lit-based test harnesses for more parts of LLDB, although I'm skeptical about whether or not that is actually the best way to test the debug server pieces. Either way, this is a huge step forward from what we have today, so we should go with it.


It would be nice if, at some point, we could move past "It's hard" and start getting into the details of what's hard about it.  (Note this goes for LLDB client as well as lldb server).  I see a lot of general hand-wavy comments about how conditionals are needed, or variables, etc, but that doesn't really do anything to convince me that it's hard.  After all, we wrote a C++ compiler!  And I'm pretty sure that the compiler-rt and sanitizer test suite is just as complicated as, if not more complicated than any hypothetical lldb test suite.  And those have been solved.

What *would* help would be to ignore how difficult it may or may not be, and just take a couple of tests and re-write them in some DSL that you invent specifically for this purpose that is as concise as possible yet as expressive as you need, and we go from there.  I did this with a couple of fairly hairy tests a few months ago and it didn't seem that bad to me.

The thing is, the set of people who are experts on the client side of LLDB and the set of people who are experts on the client side of LLVM/lit/etc are mostly disjoint, so nothing is ever going to happen without some sort of collaboration.  For example, I'm more than willing to help out writing the lit bits of it, but I would need a specification of what the test language needs to look like to support all of the use cases.  And someone else has to provide that since we want to get the design right.  Even if implementing the language is hard, deciding what it needs to look like is supposed to be the easy part!


https://reviews.llvm.org/D32930