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4 points by zck 3888 days ago | link | parent

I'm going to have to go to bed soon, as I need to wake up in eight hours and twenty minutes, and I've promised myself I'm going to try to sleep enough, for once.

So I'll just explain what, in my mind, is the biggest difference -- how I want to use it. To run the anarki test-iso test, you execute the entire `(test-iso ..)` sexp. If you want to run a bunch of tests, you have to execute all the sexps.

That's kind of a hassle. Especially if you find a bug, have a bunch of tests that fail, then change a small thing in the function, and want to re-run all the tests.

In my unit-test.arc, all you have to do is call `(run-suites suite-name)`, and it'll run as many tests as you've got in `suite-name`. You don't have to copy a bunch of sexps into the repl or reload the file (and what if you want to run a subset of a file? You can't). Also -- and this is one of the features I'm currently working on (https://bitbucket.org/zck/unit-test.arc/issue/21/after-runni...), what if you run one hundred tests at once? Do you really want to parse -- with your eyes, like a bloody scribe -- every single line of output to find the seven tests that broke? And when you then make a fix, you're not going to want to parse them again, so you'll only run the seven that failed before. So if you broke something else, you won't find that out.

So, what falls out of my desire to run a set of tests easily and repeatably, and have summarized output? Some sort of grouping, with a single point of entry to run the tests -- that is to say, test suites.

Please correct me if I've missed any feature of Anarki's test framework. I did read its code and try it, but I didn't look into other files for supporting functionality.



2 points by akkartik 3888 days ago | link

Thanks! You're absolutely right, I've had every single one of these problems, I just never focused on them. But I'd often comment out a bunch of tests in the middle of debugging just one.

(brianru also reminded me that arc has a whole new recent unit-test framework with suites: https://github.com/brianru/anarki/commit/b62a38ebcd via https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/pull/15)

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