Utah Valley University teaches D (using TDPL)

[Walter Bright]

Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> I'm a firm believer that D unit tests should not change how they fundamentally 
> work at this point. I don't _want_ it to report the number of tests that passed. 

That's right. The number that fail is completely useless window dressing.

> That information is not at all useful. And if I want to do something like set up 
> something to run dmd periodically and report only when the tests start failing, 
> then the current situation is perfect.
> 
> I _do_ think that the unit testing stuff should be expanded to have named unit 
> tests and do whatever is necessary to make it possible for external tools to run 
> the unit tests. Then you could have an external tool that did things like only 
> run specific unit tests and report which tests succeeded and which failed.
> 
> So, I do think that it should be possible to build external tools on D's unit 
> testing framework, but I think that it's quite good as it is now, and I wouldn't 
> want to see it drastically changed.
> 
> The two changes that I want to see to the current framework are
> 
> 1. Make it so that every unittest block runs in a module instead of them 
> stopping once one failed. The current situation is better than stopping _all_ 
> unittest blocks once a single test fails, but it's still not granular enough. I 
> believe that this change is planned, but work has to be done to make it 
> possible, and that work hasn't been done yet.

I believe that is the current behavior. For a time, it kept getting broken by 
changes to druntime, so it may be broken yet again, but that is the way it is 
supposed to work.


> 2. Make it possible to name unittest blocks. This would make exceptions that 
> escape unittest blocks _far_ more useful. Names like unittest45 really aren't 
> useful at all. I can't even figure out how it does the numbering.

If the line numbers given out are incorrect, those are compiler bugs and I'd 
like to get them fixed.

 > Also, having named unittest blocks would be a necessity for properly allowing 
external tools to run the unit tests.

I don't really know how that would work.


> I do _not_ want to see D programs printing out anything more than they do when 
> running unit tests. I'm totally open to external tools which do more (it would 
> particularly good for IDEs to be able to run unittest blocks individually), but 
> I do not want to see the basic framework change how it prints feedback on test 
> successes and failures. It works great as it is now.

Yes, and if anyone wants more, a writefln("your message here") works just fine.