A Minimal Test Runner

A long time ago when I was working a MPWTest, "The simplest Objective-C Unit Test Framework that could possibly work...", I had a brief chat with Kent Beck about it, and one of the things he said was that everyone should build their own unit test "framework".

Why the scare quotes?

If your testing framework is actually a framework, it's probably too big. I recently started porting MPWFoundation and Objective-Smalltalk to GNUstep again, in order to get it running In the Cloud™. In order to see how it's going, it's probably helpful to run the tests.

Initially, I needed to test some compiler issues with such modern amenities as keyed subscripting of dictionaries:

---

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

int main( int argc, char *argv[] ) {
  MPWDictStore *a=[MPWDictStore store];
  a[@"hi"]=@"there";
  NSLog(@"hi: %@",a[@"hi"]);
  return 0;

}

---

Once that was resolved with the help of Alex Denisov, I wanted to minimally run some tests, but the idea of first getting all of MPWTest to run wasn't very appealing. So instead I just did the simplest thing that could possible work:

---

static void runTests()
{
  int tests=0;
  int success=0;
  int failure=0;
  NSArray *classes=@[
    @"MPWDictStore",
    @"MPWReferenceTests",
  ];

  for (NSString *className in classes ) {
    id testClass=NSClassFromString( className );
    NSArray *testNames=[testClass testSelectors];
    for ( NSString *testName in testNames ) {
      SEL testSel=NSSelectorFromString( testName );
      @try {
        tests++;
        [testClass performSelector:testSel];
        NSLog(@"%@:%@ -- success",className,testName);
        success++;
      } @catch (id error)  {
        NSLog(@"%@:%@ == failure: %@",className,testName,error);
        failure++;
      }
    }

  }
  printf("\033[91;3%dmtests: %d total, %d successes %d failures\033[0m\n",
         failure>0 ? 1:2,tests,success,failure);
}

---

That's it, my minimal testrunner. With hard-coded list of classes to test. In a sense, that is the entire "test framework", the rest just being conventions followed by classes that wish to be tested.

And of course MPWTest's slogan was a bit...optimistic.