Parallel execution of unittests

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

Hello,


A coworker mentioned the idea that unittests could be run in parallel 
(using e.g. a thread pool). I've rigged things to run in parallel 
unittests across modules, and that works well. However, this is too 
coarse-grained - it would be great if each unittest could be pooled 
across the thread pool. That's more difficult to implement.

This brings up the issue of naming unittests. It's becoming increasingly 
obvious that anonymous unittests don't quite scale - coworkers are 
increasingly talking about "the unittest at line 2035 is failing" and 
such. With unittests executing in multiple threads and issuing e.g. 
logging output, this is only likely to become more exacerbated. We've 
resisted named unittests but I think there's enough evidence to make the 
change.

Last but not least, virtually nobody I know runs unittests and then 
main. This is quickly becoming an idiom:

version(unittest) void main() {}
else void main()
{
    ...
}

I think it's time to change that. We could do it the 
non-backward-compatible way by redefining -unittest to instruct the 
compiler to not run main. Or we could define another flag such as 
-unittest-only and then deprecate the existing one.

Thoughts? Would anyone want to work on such stuff?


Andrei