unittests are really part of the build, not a special run

[Atila Neves via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 1 April 2015 at 18:04:31 UTC, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
> On Monday, 30 March 2015 at 22:20:08 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
> wrote:
>> This is a tooling issue.
>
> I think D's built-in "unittest" blocks are a mistake.
>
> Yes, they are simple and for simple functions and algorithms 
> they
> work pretty well.
>
> However, when you have a big complex project you start having
> other needs:
> 1. Named unit-tests, so you can better find what failed
> 2. Better error messages for assertions
> 3. Better output to rerun failed tests
> 4. Setup and teardown hooks
> 5. Different outputs depending on use case
>
> All of this can be done with a library solution. D should have a
> very good library solution in phobos and it should be encouraged
> to use that. DMD could even know about this library and have
> special commands to trigger the tests.

It has been done, several times, by different people. I'm partial 
to unit-threaded but then again I would be since I wrote it :)

Atila

>
> The problem is that you can start with "unittest" blocks, but
> then you realize you need more, so what do you do? You combine
> both? You can't!
>
> I'd say, deprecate "unittest" and write a good test library. You
> can still provide it for backwards compatibility.
>
> By the way, this is the way we do it in Crystal. The source code
> for the spec library is here, if you need some inspiration:
> https://github.com/manastech/crystal/tree/master/src/spec . It's
> just 687 lines long.