std.unittests for (final?) review

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday 03 January 2011 07:17:56 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 1/3/11 9:02 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > On Monday 03 January 2011 06:43:24 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> >> On 1/3/11 3:38 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> >>> On Mon, 03 Jan 2011 06:44:50 +0200, Jonathan M Davis
> >>> 
> >>> <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>  wrote:
> >>>> So, please have a look at the code.
> >>> 
> >>> Just one thing: wouldn't these functions also be useful in contract
> >>> programming (invariants etc.)? Perhaps they should just be added to
> >>> std.exception?
> >> 
> >> In fact (without looking at std.unittest) I think it should be grouped
> >> with a simple benchmark facility. That's what the homonym frameworks in
> >> Google's and Facebook's code base do.
> > 
> > I'm afraid that I don't see what unit test helper functions have to do
> > with benchmarking.
> 
> They both help the decision: "Is this module good to go?" At work we
> almost always put benchmarks in the same file as the unit tests, and run
> them together (subject to a --benchmark flag because benchmarks tend to
> take a fair amount of time). I find that very natural, although I should
> add that the unittest and benchmark libraries are nominally distinct.
> 
> > And I don't believe that we have a benchmarking module at the
> > moment regardless, so if you want to do that, we'd need to create one.
> > The only benchmarking stuff that I'm aware of is the bencharking stuff
> > in std.datetime that SHOO did, which isn't all that much code. I would
> > have thought that unit test helper functions would merit their own
> > module, particularly when I don't see what they have to do with
> > benchmarks.
> 
> Adding basic support for benchmarking shouldn't be difficult and does
> not entail a lot of code, but I understand it if you're not all that
> motivated to work on that.

I'm by no means against it, but I wouldn't have a clue what to even do for 
benchmarking code. I've never used a benchmarking library or done much more than 
the occasional ad-hoc benchmarks, so I'm not at all familiar with what would be 
typically done for benchmarking in a library. I'm really not the person to 
implement such functionality. And I'm busy enough with other stuff at the moment, 
that I'm not in a hurry to spend time trying to figure out the best benchmarking 
functionality for Phobos. It could be that it's very straightforward, but using 
something similar to SHOO's stopwatch to time code is about as far as my 
experience goes.

- Jonathan M Davis