[racket] Unit Testing Best Practice in Racket

20 minutes ago, Chad Albers wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As a Ruby dev, I really like unit testing.  I've been using RackUnit
> to suits my needs.  I was wondering, though, about how people go
> about writing their tests for Racket.  Many of the functions that I
> write will not be part of the public API that a want to share from a
> module.  I can test the side-effects of these functions in the tests
> for the public functions that depend on the private ones.  I find
> it, though, handy  to test the non-public functions on their
> own.  Is there a way to run unit test against these 'private
> functions', without making them public via a (provide)

[I'll re-use an email I sent in a different place recently...]

There are several approaches for this, the two popular ones are:

1. One is to put most of the code in some internal module (which goes
   in some `private' directory), and have another module which
   provides the public api.  With this you can write low-level tests
   against this internal module in addition to the ones that are done
   with the public api.

2. Another approach is to go into the module via a back door.  For
   example, rackunit has `require/expose' which can pull out any
   definition.  Another way to do this is to create a sandbox for the
   module, which gives you an evaluator that works in the context of
   the module.

A new one:

3. If you use nightly builds, you can put the test code in a
   sub-module:

     #lang racket
     ...
     (module+ test (require rackunit))
     ...
     (module+ test ...test code here...)
     ...

   The `test' submodule (which is made from all of the (module+ test
   ...) parts) is included in the bytecode, but it is not loaded or
   executed when the module is required.  If you run the code directly
   in drracket it would run it, or if you use the `raco test' utility.

   (Again, this is all new stuff that is not in 5.2.1.)

(And BTW, I personally think that testing at the public interface
level is *much* better whenever its possible.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!