digitalmars.D.bugs - [Issue 13014] New: Test Phobos with a QuickCheck-like tool too?
- via Digitalmars-d-bugs (39/40) Jul 01 2014 https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13014
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13014 Issue ID: 13014 Summary: Test Phobos with a QuickCheck-like tool too? Product: D Version: D2 Hardware: All OS: All Status: NEW Severity: enhancement Priority: P1 Component: Phobos Assignee: nobody puremagic.com Reporter: braddr puremagic.com (Originally posted by bearophile_hugs eml.cc) QuickCheck is a testing tool widely used in Haskell: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction_to_QuickCheck1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickCheckIn QuickCheck the programmer writes assertions about logical properties that a function should fulfill. Then QuickCheck attempts to generate test cases that falsify these assertions.<The test cases are generated randomly, up to a certain length and complexity, that can be specified. In Haskell there is also a similar tool, SmallCheck, that "allows to verify properties for all test cases up to some depth", so its test cases are not random, it's deterministic: http://ro-che.info/articles/2013-02-19-smallcheck.html https://github.com/feuerbach/smallcheck There are QuickCheck-like tools for most languages, including D and C++: https://github.com/mcandre/dashcheck http://software.legiasoft.com/quickcheck/ In this enhancement request I suggest to consider using a QuickCheck-like tool (like DashCheck) to test Phobos, and to better remove Phobos bugs. The functions that specify the logical proprieties of the Phobos code should be bundled inside the standard D distributions, like the unittests. One side effect of shipping the D compiler with a QuickCheck-like tool (used for Phobos, and later for the front-end written in D) is to encourage D programmers to use such standard tool in their programs. I think this could improve the quality of all D code, beyond Phobos. Note: such testing functions are similar to the post-conditions. So in theory a well implemented QuickCheck-like tool for D should use the post-conditions to generate the test cases. --
Jul 01 2014