[racket] Unit Testing Best Practice in Racket

Thanks for the great suggestions.  I agree that I should really be testing
the public interface rather than the implementation.  As a Racket n00b, I
write small functions to compose the larger public facing functions, so
testing these smaller/private functions prevents me for going off track.

Thanks again,

--
Chad Albers



On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 7:05 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:

> 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!
>
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