Unit tests and segfaults

[Russel Winder]

On Thursday, 6 December 2012 at 10:31:43 UTC, Alex Rønne Petersen 
wrote:
> On 06-12-2012 10:02, Russel Winder wrote:
>> What is the right idiom for testing that a function call does 
>> segfault
>> when you want it to?
>>
>
> There is basically no portable, clean way to do that. Why are 
> you relying on segmentation faults? It's generally speaking a 
> very bad idea because behavior depends entirely on the platform 
> and architecture...

I am not relying on segfaults, that would just be silly ;-) The 
issue is that unit tests should test error as well as success. I 
want to know if I get a segfault when I have an infinite 
recursion in an algorithm (due to incorrect parameters slipping 
through data validation).

I am also trying to investigate tail recursion optimization and 
getting a segfault is a way of detecting that it isn't happening.

(Sorry for the delay in replying I lost the email in my client.)