Re: [Caml-list] [ANN] Kaputt 1.0 alpha

[forum@x9c.fr]

Selon Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@upsilon.cc>:

> On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 09:57:37PM +0100, barista@x9c.fr wrote:
> > This is clearly alpha work, so any suggestion/criticism will be
> > welcome in order to enhance/correct it.
>
> Hi Xavier, thanks for this.
>
> You are probably aware of oUnit [1] which, AFAIK, was the only testing
> library available for OCaml thus far. Hence I guess you developed
> Kaputt to achieve something which was not possible with oUnit or to
> achieve it somehow differently.
>
> Can you please comment over the differences between Kaputt and oUnit?

I was indeed aware of oUnit when I started working on Kaputt.
The initial intent was to provide OCaml with something along
the lines of the QuickCheck library developed for Haskell
(http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/QuickCheck/). Clones of QuickCheck
exist for various languages (caml-list@inria.fr) but not for OCaml,
even if a QuickCheck equivalent is provided by the Reins library
(http://ocaml-reins.sourceforge.net/).

Put shortly, the idea of QuickCheck is to encode the specification
of a function using predicates and to ask the framework to generate
random test cases to check that the function adheres to its specification.

After designing this part of the library, I realized that it would
be quite annoying (at least for me, the very first user) to have
two libraries to code my tests. That's why I decided to add to Kaputt
the functionalities found in oUnit.

In summary: Kaptt = oUnit + {QuickCheck part of Reins}.
People may get angry at such effort duplication, and I would understand
it. My point is to put forward a unique library specialized in testing.


Xavier