Catch2 released

Phil Nash from level of indirection

Super Catch

I've been talking about Catch2 for a while - but now it's finally here! The big news for Catch2 is that it drops all support for pre-C++11 compilers. Other than meaning that some users will not be supported (you can still use Catch "Classic" (1.x) - which will get some bug fix updates for a while, at least) that's mostly an internal change - however it enables a number of user-facing changes, both now and in the future. Let's take a look at what they are.

New and shiny

New, composable, command line processor

Clara is the command line parser in Catch. In Catch 1.0 I spun it out into its own library (but it's still embedded in the Catch single header). Like Catch 1.0 itself, Clara was constrained to C++98 compatibility. For Catch2 I've rewritten Clara from the ground up, not only to fully embrace C++11, but also to be composable. What that means here is that each individual command line option or argument can be represented using its own, self-contained, parser. A composite parser of all the options is then assembled, or composed, from those smaller parsers.

The main advantage of this approach is that the set of available options is now trivially extendible outside of Catch, so users can easily specify command line options that can tune their test code.

See my lightning talk at CppCon this year for a bit more

Commas in assertions

As Catch assertions are implemented using macros, it was susceptible to the old problem of how macros interpret commas within macro arguments. Commas may occur in contexts that macros don't know about, such as within angle brackets (e.g. for template instantiations) - and so get interpreted as argument separators for the macro itself.

Now that we can rely on C++11, which includes variadic macros, we can make the assertions variadic, and just reassemble all the arguments again inside. That means we can now write code like the following:

  REQUIRE( getPair() == std::pair<true, "banana">() );

Microbenchmarking (experimental)

Catch2 gains initial support for micro-benchmarking. This is where small pieces of code are timed, usually in a loop so they are repeated enough times to be significant compared to the system clock accuracy. Some extra adjustments need to be made to allow for other sources of jitter and slowdown on the host machine - and, even then, multiple samples should be taken so they can be subject to statistical analysis.

There are many shortcomings with micro-benchmarks - not least that the performance of a piece of code in isolation can often be drastically different to how well it performs in conjunction with other code. This is not only due to the way the compiler may inline or otherwise optimise code together, but even on the CPU instructions can be reordered, pipelined or run in parallel - and with cache levels and branch prediction, the relationship between these things becomes hugely unpredictable.

Nonetheless they can still be useful - and it can be convenient to use the same test framework that you use to write functional tests - not least because there is much shared infrastructure.

Catch's benchmarking support is incomplete at time of this writing, lacking the multi-sampling, statistical analysis and richer reporting that fully-fledged frameworks offer. The intention is to grow this, but only if it can be done without any significant impact to non-benchmarking tests. In lieu of full documentation, see the example tests for now.

Performance

Both runtime and compile time performance are becoming increasingly important for Catch, and a lot of work is going into improving both. Runtime performance was a non-goal initially, so there has been plenty of low-hanging fruit. As a result we're already seeing some significant improvements, and there is more to come.

Compile time is harder. This has always been important, but as Catch has grown over the years, it has begun to suffer. Improving it significantly means making some trade-offs. So far some features that drag compile times have been made configurable - e.g. whether breaking into the debugger on a failed assertion happens in the code that caused it (meaning the debugger code gets compiled into every assertion macro) or one level up the stack (so can be "hidden" in a function). Other areas to look at are whether to use (non-standard, potentially brittle) forward declarations of some standard library types. Again, this is an ongoing area of active development - but much is already in Catch2 at launch.

See some of the toggle macros for more details

A new name

Believe it or not "Catch2" is now the name - it's not just a version reference! In fact the current intention is that, even when we move to v3.x it will still be called Catch2. E.g. Catch2 v3.0. Why? Well there have been calls for a name change - for searchability reasons. Catch is obviously a common keyword in C++, and also in unit testing. So getting search terms sufficiently narrow has been tricky. But I didn't want to use an entirely different name (although I did toy with the idea of "Catfish" for a while) - because that would lose too much of the momentum behind Catch overall. A derivative name doesn't fully solve the problem, because people will still refer to it as Catch, casually - but at least it gives a slight advantage. So that's what I've gone with. There are also a few interesting numerological aspects to it. It stops short of being Catch22 - but if you consider the C++11 requirement you could multiply them to get 22. And you can add the digits in C++11 to get 2.

Upcoming features

It's always dangerous to talk about what's planned - and I've fallen into this trap with Catch before. So there are some feature promises that have been outstanding for a long time now. In fact most of those have been deferred to Catch2 for quite some time - either because C++11 has features that make them much easier/ possible to implement (e.g. threading) - or just because they involved a lot of code that gets less noisy in C++11. So we'll talk about those again here.

Threading

This was unfeasible in Catch 1.x due not having C++11 threading primitives, or being able to use external dependencies like Boost for threading. To provide a basic level of support should now be fairly straightforward as a lot of groundwork has been laid (e.g. how singletons are organised).

The idea is that if, within a test case, you use additional threads, you should be able to make assertions from those threads - as long as the test case is still in scope at the time. The aim is for this to be done without locks in the assertions. Running multiple test cases in parallel is not immediately planned (and may be best implemented at the process level, anyway).

Generators/ Property Based Testing

Generators give you what other frameworks might call (Data-)Parameterised Tests - i.e. being able to use the same test code with different inputs. An experimental version of generators was included in Catch from very early on. Other than not being complete and having some limitations it also had a serious issue in that it didn't work at all with Sections! This is because both features relied on the ability to re-enter test cases - but they were independent of each other. I rewrote the test-case tracking code a couple of years ago now to be able to support this properly - and had a proof-of-concept new implementation of Generators working with it - enough to give a demo at a talk I gave. However the implementation was getting noisy with C++98 syntax so I deferred work on it for Catch2. Now that Catch2 is released I'll be looking at this again. Closely related to Generators - in fact it builds on it - is the idea of Property Based Testing. The proof-of-concept I mentioned actually had an initial version of this, too. There's more work involved here to getting it right, but having Generators is a first step.

Breaking Changes

As a major version change we've taken advantage of the permission that Semantic Versioning gives us to introduce a few breaking changes. These should have little, if any, impact on most users - but it's worth checking these before making the move to be sure you're ready.

toString() has been removed

This is probably the biggest change, and the most likely to affect people. For a long time there have been three ways to tell Catch how to convert values into strings for reporting purposes. In order, the pipeline was like this:
  1. toString() overload
  2. StringMaker<> specialisation
  3. ostream& operator << overload
  4. give up and use {?}

If your types already have << overloads for ostream then you're good. If not then, in theory, overloading toString() was the simplest option.

However toString() had a number of limitations - mostly due to the point of template instantiation. Compiler differences with two-phase lookup, and other factors which are implementation defined, mean that toString() overloads were unreliable and caused a lot of confusion - hardly the simplest option after all!

Specialising StringMaker<> is slightly more work, but is more reliable, stable, and flexible. So this is now the recommended way to provide string conversion functionality for your types. In Catch2, toString() has been completely removed!

If you have code that calls toString() there is a new function that plays that role: Catch::detail::stringify(). However, note that (a) this should never be overloaded - it just wraps the call into the pipeline that starts with StringMaker<> and (b) the detail part of the namespace should be a clue that this is really an internal part of Catch and is subject to change.

To specialise StringMaker<> see the documentation.

Other removals and changes

As well as C++98 support and toString(), a number of deprecated features and interfaces have been removed, as well as a few other tweaks and changes that may impact some code-bases. See the "Breaking Changes" section in the release notes for the full list. In fact the release notes in general give a good overview of all the many small changes and improvements that have gone into Catch2 that have not been mentioned here.

A new home

The Catch(2) repository has moved! You may not have noticed as it has been transferred in GitHub, and that means GitHub maintains redirects for all the old links. However they do recommend updating your own urls, in bookmarks, direct download links and, of course, git remotes. We've made this move for two reasons:

1. As Catch has grown it has become more of a community effort. It already has an additional lead maintainer in Martin Hořeňovský, and others may be added. But as the sole owner of my own personal GitHub account there are some things that only I could do (webhooks and other integrations, for example). So as not to be a bottleneck we've created a GitHub "Organization" account, CatchOrg, which allows multiple admin users. That's where we've moved it to.

2. For Catch2 to get any traction as a new name it was important for it to be reflected in the repo name, so we've taken advantage of the move to change the repo name, too. Catch "Classic" (1.x) has also moved here, but is now on a branch. If you cannot move to Catch2 for C++98 compatibility reasons you can stay on Catch Classic on this branch. It will continue to receive critical fixes, at least for now, but is no longer the active development branch. Please try to move to Catch2 as soon as possible.

If you notice anything broken as a result of this move, please let us know so we can fix it.

Thanks!

As always, a huge thanks to all who have supported and contributed to Catch and Catch2 - especially for your patience when I wasn't getting to issues and PRs as quickly as was needed!

An extra thanks to Martin, who has been doing the majority of the work on Catch this year!

Catch Up

Phil Nash from level of indirection

Trolley

Stock image from Shutterstock

It's been just over six years since I first announced Catch to the world as a brand new C++ test framework!

In that time it has matured to the point that it can take on the heavyweights - while still staying true to its original goals of being lightweight, easy to get started with and low-friction to work with.

In the last couple of years or so it has also increased dramatically in popularity! That sounds like a good thing - and it is - but with that comes a greater diversity of environments and usage, and more people raising issues and submitting pull requests.

Again, it's great to have so much input from the community - especially in the form of pull requests - where other developers have gone to some effort to implement a change, or a fix, and present it back for inclusion in the main project. So it's been heart-breaking for me that, between this increase in volume and finding my meagre free-time stretched even further, so many issues and PRs have been left unacknowledged - many not even seen by me in the first place.

But two things have happened, recently, that completely change this state of affairs. We're moving firmly in the right direction again.

Firstly, as mentioned in On Joining JetBrains, I've recently changed jobs to one that should give me much more time and opportunity to work on Catch - as well as the opportunity to do so in my home office - with stable internet (as opposed to on the train while commuting to and from work). The first few months were a bit of a wash for the reasons discussed in that post, but, as I also suggested there, this year has seen that change and I've been able to put in quite a lot of work on Catch already.

But that's not really enough. There's a huge back-log - and I'm still only doing this part time - and I want to spend time working on Catch2 as well (more on that soon). I don't want to end up back in the situation where everything is backing up and there's no hope of recovery.

I've been hoping to find someone else to be a key maintainer of Catch for a couple of years now. I've not been very active in this search - for all the same reasons - but it's been on my mind.

But, just last month, after I appeared on CppCast talking about JetBrains and Catch, there was a thread on Reddit about it - with many expressing concern over the Catch situation. I brought the subject up on there again and got the attention of one of the commenters.

I didn't know it at the time, but Martin Hořeňovský has been responsible for a good number of those PRs and issues that had been left unaddressed - as well as an active community member in helping address other people's issues. So it's with great pleasure (and relief!) that I can announce that Martin now has full commit rights to Catch on GitHub and has been prolific in working through the currently outstanding tickets.

Martin seems to really "get" Catch, and the design goals around it - so working with him on this the last couple of weeks has been very rewarding. From some queries I just ran on GitHub it looks like 39 issues have been closed and 38 PRs merged or closed in that time! That's compared to 9 new issues and 7 PRs - about half of which were created by Martin and I in the process. And that's not to mention all the labels we've been using to categorise the other tickets - with many marked as "Resolved - pending review" - which usually means we think it's resolved but we're just waiting for feedback (or a chance for more testing).

With 219 open issues and 41 PRs still outstanding, at time of writing, there's a lot more work to do yet - but I hope this reassures you that we're going in the right direction - and fast!

And we're not stopping with Martin. We have at least one other volunteer that I'll be bringing up to speed soon.

Catch2

I've referred to Catch2 a number of times now, and talked a little about what it will be. The biggest reason for making it a major release, according to Semantic Versioning, is that it will drop support for pre-C++11. For that reason Catch Classic (1.x) will continue to receive at least bug fix updates - but no more new features once Catch2 is fully released. A few major features in the pipeline have been explicitly deferred to Catch2: concurrency support and generators/ property-based testing in particular.

Moving to C++11 provides a very large scope for cleaning up the code-base - which has a significant volume of code dedicated to platform-specific workarounds for compiler shortcomings, missing library features such as smart pointers, and boilerplate that will no longer be necessary with things like range-based-for, auto and others. Lambdas will be useful too, but are not quite so important.

Because taking advantage of C++11 has the potential to touch almost every line of code, I'm taking the opportunity to rewrite the core of Catch - primarily the assertion macros and the infrastructure to support that. This is code that is #included in every test file, and expanded (in the case of macros) in every test case or even every assertion. Keeping this code lightweight is essential to avoiding a compile time hit. There's a number of ways this foot-print can be reduced and the rewrite will strive for this as much as possible.

The rest of the code, concerned with maintaining the registry of tests, parsing and interpreting the command line, running tests and reporting results, will be updated more incrementally.

I already have a (not-yet-public) proof-of-concept version of the re-written code. It's not yet complete but, so far, has only one standard library dependency and minimal templates. The compile-time overhead is imperceptible.

In addition to compile-time, runtime performance is also a goal of Catch2. It's not an overriding goal - I won't be obfuscating the code in the name of wringing out the last few milliseconds of performance - but this is a definite change from Catch Classic where runtime performance was a non-goal. This is in recognition of the fact that Catch is used for more than just isolated unit tests - and will also become more important with property based testing.

I don't have a timeline, yet, for when I expect Catch2 to be ready - and in the immediate term getting Catch Classic back under control is the priority. Despite the partial re-write, and the major version increment, I expect tests written against Catch Classic to mostly "just work" with Catch2 - or require very minimal changes in a some rare cases.

You

As already mentioned many developers have also spent time and effort contributing issues, fixes and even feature PRs over the years. So Catch has really been a community project for years now and I'm very grateful for all the help and support. I think Catch has shown that having a low-friction approach to testing C++ code is very important to a lot of people and I'm hoping we'll continue to build on that. Thank you all.

Catch Up

Phil Nash from level of indirection

Trolley

It's been just over six years since I first announced Catch to the world as a brand new C++ test framework!

In that time it has matured to the point that it can take on the heavyweights - while still staying true to its original goals of being lightweight, easy to get started with and low-friction to work with.

In the last couple of years or so it has also increased dramatically in popularity! That sounds like a good thing - and it is - but with that comes a greater diversity of environments and usage, and more people raising issues and submitting pull requests.

Again, it's great to have so much input from the community - especially in the form of pull requests - where other developers have gone to some effort to implement a change, or a fix, and present it back for inclusion in the main project. So it's been heart-breaking for me that, between this increase in volume and finding my meagre free-time stretched even further, so many issues and PRs have been left unacknowledged - many not even seen by me in the first place.

But two things have happened, recently, that completely change this state of affairs. We're moving firmly in the right direction again.

Firstly, as mentioned in On Joining JetBrains, I've recently changed jobs to one that should give me much more time and opportunity to work on Catch - as well as the opportunity to do so in my home office - with stable internet (as opposed to on the train while commuting to and from work). The first few months were a bit of a wash for the reasons discussed in that post, but, as I also suggested there, this year has seen that change and I've been able to put in quite a lot of work on Catch already.

But that's not really enough. There's a huge back-log - and I'm still only doing this part time - and I want to spend time working on Catch2 as well (more on that soon). I don't want to end up back in the situation where everything is backing up and there's no hope of recovery.

I've been hoping to find someone else to be a key maintainer of Catch for a couple of years now. I've not been very active in this search - for all the same reasons - but it's been on my mind.

But, just last month, after I appeared on CppCast talking about JetBrains and Catch, there was a thread on Reddit about it - with many expressing concern over the Catch situation. I brought the subject up on there again and got the attention of one of the commenters.

I didn't know it at the time, but Martin Hořeňovský has been responsible for a good number of those PRs and issues that had been left unaddressed - as well as an active community member in helping address other people's issues. So it's with great pleasure (and relief!) that I can announce that Martin now has full commit rights to Catch on GitHub and has been prolific in working through the currently outstanding tickets.

Martin seems to really "get" Catch, and the design goals around it - so working with him on this the last couple of weeks has been very rewarding. From some queries I just ran on GitHub it looks like 39 issues have been closed and 38 PRs merged or closed in that time! That's compared to 9 new issues and 7 PRs - about half of which were created by Martin and I in the process. And that's not to mention all the labels we've been using to categorise the other tickets - with many marked as "Resolved - pending review" - which usually means we think it's resolved but we're just waiting for feedback (or a chance for more testing).

With 219 open issues and 41 PRs still outstanding, at time of writing, there's a lot more work to do yet - but I hope this reassures you that we're going in the right direction - and fast!

And we're not stopping with Martin. We have at least one other volunteer that I'll be bringing up to speed soon.

Catch2

I've referred to Catch2 a number of times now, and talked a little about what it will be. The biggest reason for making it a major release, according to Semantic Versioning, is that it will drop support for pre-C++11. For that reason Catch Classic (1.x) will continue to receive at least bug fix updates - but no more new features once Catch2 is fully released. A few major features in the pipeline have been explicitly deferred to Catch2: concurrency support and generators/ property-based testing in particular.

Moving to C++11 provides a very large scope for cleaning up the code-base - which has a significant volume of code dedicated to platform-specific workarounds for compiler shortcomings, missing library features such as smart pointers, and boilerplate that will no longer be necessary with things like range-based-for, auto and others. Lambdas will be useful too, but are not quite so important.

Because taking advantage of C++11 has the potential to touch almost every line of code, I'm taking the opportunity to rewrite the core of Catch - primarily the assertion macros and the infrastructure to support that. This is code that is #included in every test file, and expanded (in the case of macros) in every test case or even every assertion. Keeping this code lightweight is essential to avoiding a compile time hit. There's a number of ways this foot-print can be reduced and the rewrite will strive for this as much as possible.

The rest of the code, concerned with maintaining the registry of tests, parsing and interpreting the command line, running tests and reporting results, will be updated more incrementally.

I already have a (not-yet-public) proof-of-concept version of the re-written code. It's not yet complete but, so far, has only one standard library dependency and minimal templates. The compile-time overhead is imperceptible.

In addition to compile-time, runtime performance is also a goal of Catch2. It's not an overriding goal - I won't be obfuscating the code in the name of wringing out the last few milliseconds of performance - but this is a definite change from Catch Classic where runtime performance was a non-goal. This is in recognition of the fact that Catch is used for more than just isolated unit tests - and will also become more important with property based testing.

I don't have a timeline, yet, for when I expect Catch2 to be ready - and in the immediate term getting Catch Classic back under control is the priority. Despite the partial re-write, and the major version increment, I expect tests written against Catch Classic to mostly "just work" with Catch2 - or require very minimal changes in a some rare cases.

You

As already mentioned many developers have also spent time and effort contributing issues, fixes and even feature PRs over the years. So Catch has really been a community project for years now and I'm very grateful for all the help and support. I think Catch has shown that having a low-friction approach to testing C++ code is very important to a lot of people and I'm hoping we'll continue to build on that. Thank you all.

On joining JetBrains

Phil Nash from level of indirection

JbOffice

The JetBrains office in St. Petersburg

I recently joined JetBrains as Developer Advocate for their (our) C++ related tools, CLion (a cross-platform C++ IDE), AppCode (for Mac and iOS development - also supporting Swift and Objective-C) and ReSharper C++ (plug-in for Visual Studio).

This was a significant move for me as my previous full-time role had been as a developer at one place for over seven years! In that time I had been able to take time out to do occasional stints of coaching and consulting, as well as travelling to a number of conferences and other events where I always felt like I was more a part of the community. But making that a significant part of my job has been an interesting transition.

JetBrains are a superb software engineering company with a friendly, diverse, set of employees, distributed across a number of offices. I primarily interact with members in St. Petersburg, Russia and Munich, Germany (and have already visited both offices). Personally I work at home - as do the rest of the Developer Advocacy team (their respective homes, that is. There's not quite enough room at my place!)

I'm not going to talk too much more about my role in general, here. I covered it a bit more in an interview published on some of the JetBrains blogs soon after I joined. What I wanted to talk about here is how it affects my other activities - and in particular Catch.

One of the enticing things about taking this role was that I would be expected to continue work on Open Source projects. After all I wouldn't be working on a paid project anymore - but I still need to keep my skills relevant (and not just tuned to small, self-contained, demos). Over the last three months, however, I've found there has been a lot more to get up-to-speed on - as well as opportunity to overbook myself - than I had anticipated. So catching up on Catch has been minimal so far.

But with my first three release-oriented activities under my belt, and a clearer idea of what to expect, I'm looking forward to turning that around early in the new year. I have a lot of issues and PRs to catch up on, and I've started work on Catch2 in parallel, which I'm keen to get to a first release of (I intend to follow-up soon with a post on Catch2). I'm also hoping to find people I can work with (and give commit rights to) to help with all of the above.

Beyond Catch I expect to blog more frequently again (both here and on the JetBrains blogs) and I have some other projects in the pipeline too.

A Game of Tag

Phil Nash from level of indirection

One of the tent-pole features of Catch is the ability to write test names as free-form strings. When you run a Catch executable from the command line you can specify a test case by name, to run just that one:

./MyTestExe "a very nice test case"

or you can use wildcards to run a group of test cases (or just one with less typing):

./MyTestExe "*very nice*"

If you want to use wildcards but you're not sure what they'll match you can combine this with the listing option, -l, to see which test cases match the pattern:

./MyTestExe "*very nice*" -l
Matching test cases:
  a very nice test case
  a not very nice test case
2 matching test cases

This is already quite a powerful way to group test cases into ad-hoc "suites". However we don't want to twist our test names into artificial schemes for this purposes (although, early on, that's exactly what I proposed). Instead Catch allows you to add "tags" to test cases.

TEST_CASE( "a very nice test case", "[nice][good]" ) { /* ... */ }
TEST_CASE( "a not very nice test case", "[nice][bad]" ) { /* ... */ }

Now we can run all tests with a certain tag:

./MyTestExe [good]

or combination of tags:

./MyTestExe [nice][good]

also with exclusions:

./MyTestExe [nice]~[bad]

unions are supported with ,:

./MyTestExe [nice],[pleasant]

Very powerful! And this functionality has been around for a while.

More recent, and less well known (mostly because they weren't documented until recently) are a set of "special tags": Instruction Tags, Hiding Tags, Tag Aliases and some automatically generated tags.

Let's see what they're all about.

Instruction Tags

In general all tags that start with a symbol are reserved by Catch (or, put another way, user defined tag names must start with an alpha-numeric character). This allows a nice rich range of namespaces for special tags. Tags that start with the ! character are Instruction tags. They inform Catch something about the test case that they apply to. At time of writing the following are defined:

  • [!hide] This "hides" the test from the default run (i.e. if you run the test executable without specifying any names or tags). This feature was originally introduced with the [hide] tag (note, no: !) - and is still supported, though deprecated. There is also a shortcut form, [.] which we'll revisit in a moment.
  • [!throws] This tells Catch that an exception may be thrown in the course of executing the test - even if it is caught and dealt with. If you've ever tried to track down a rogue exception in your debugger - and so have set the debugger to break on exceptions as they're thrown - you'll know how frustrating all the false positives coming from such tests are! So Catch provides a way to suppress exceptions it is expecting - through the -e or --nothrow options on the command line. This already skips over REQUIRE_THROWS... or CHECK_THROWS... assertions. The [!throws] tag covers you for cases where the exception is caught and handled in the code under test (or your test code).
  • [!shouldfail] This tells Catch that you're expecting this test to fail! Furthermore, if it does fail then it should treat that as a pass!
  • [!mayfail] Rather than explicitly inverting the pass/ fail logic as the previous tag does, this tag just says that the test may fail but that's ok (although it is still reported). It's also ok if it passes.

Hiding Tags

We already looked at [!hide] (and the deprecated [hide]) above, and mentioned that [.] was a shortcut for the same.

It turns that when one of these tags is used it is often combined with another tag that is used when you do want to run the test. The classic example is where you write integration tests in the same executable as unit tests. By default you don't want the integration tests to run as you want the shortest possible path to running just unit tests. So you hide them but also tag them [integration], or something similar (the word "integration" has no significance to Catch). So pairings like, [.][integration] or [.][performance] are frequently found together.

So, as a convenience, Catch now supports . as a tag prefix. The rest of the tag can be completely custom and works exactly like any other normal tag - except that the test is also hidden. Our examples would, thus, be written as [.integration] and [.performance]

One final point to mention about hiding tags is that, due to the way they have evolved through a number of forms (including the severely deprecated "./" name prefix) whichever form is used will not only hide the test, but any of the other forms will match it in a tag pattern. e.g. if you tag a test with [.] you can match it with [!hide].

Tag Aliases

As we saw earlier, tags can be combined in fairly complex ways. While this is powerful and flexible, it can be a bit awkward if you often want to use the same tag expression. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way of writing the expression once then getting Catch to remember it for you - and associate it with an easier to remember name?

Well there is! You can associate any tag pattern with a name that you can use just like any normal tag - except that it must begin with the @ character.

You create a tag alias, in code, using the CATCH_REGISTER_TAG_ALIAS macro. E.g.

CATCH_REGISTER_TAG_ALIAS( "[@not nice]", "~[nice]~[!hide]" );

This registers a tag alias, [@not nice] which, when expanded will match all tests that are not tagged [nice] but also are not hidden. The second part is important because if you have any hidden tests then they will usually be included any time you use a not expression (~) because the rule is that tests are only hidden if no pattern is specified!

Also did you notice that we had a space in the tag name? Surprised? I never said that tags could not include spaces. Of course they can.

You can register as many aliases as you like and you can put them anywhere you like (as long as catch.hpp is #included). However I recommend keeping them all in your main source file (the one you #define CATCH_CONFIG_MAIN, or equivalent) - simply so you only have to look in one place for them.

Filenames As Tags

The newest special tag form is the result of automatically generating a set of tags. The tags all begin with the # character (I've resisted the urge to call them "hash tags"). The rest of the tag is generated from the name of the source file that the test is implemented in. The full path (as reported by __FILE__) is stripped of its directories and extension - so all tests in /Development/Tests/SquirrelTests.cpp would be tagged, [#SquirrelTests].

At time of writing this feature is only available on the develop branch on GitHub - and must be specifically enabled running with the --filenames-as-tags or -# command line options. It's possible that situation may change by the time it makes it onto master.

The Tag Line

So tags not only provide a rich grouping mechanism in Catch - they also allow you to control some aspects of how Catch runs and treats test cases. Some tags can be generated for you - and some tags can be expanded from simpler forms. We've covered here the complete set of special tags at the time of writing. If you're reading this in the future there may be more - I'll try and be better at keeping the docs up-to-date there. Also any stock price tips you might have from the future would be welcome too.

Modern C++ Testing

Phil Nash from level of indirection

Back in August I took my family to stay for a week at my brother's house in (Old) South Wales. I've not been to Wales for a long time and it was great to be back there - but that's not what this post is about, of course.

The thing about Wales is that it has mountains (and where there are no mountains there are plenty of hills and valleys and cliffs). Mobile cell coverage is non-existent in much of the country - particularly where my brother lives.

So the timing was particularly bad when, just as we were driving along the south cost (somewhere between Cardiff and Swansea, I think), I started getting emails and tweets from people pointing out that Catch was riding high on HackerNews! Someone had recently discovered Catch and was enjoying it enough that they wanted to share it with the community. Which is awesome!

Except that, between lack of mobile reception and spending time with my family, I didn't have opportunity to join the discussion.

When I got back home a week later I read through the comments. One of them stuck out because it called me out on describing Catch as a "Modern C++" framework (the commenter recommended another framework, Bandit, as being "more modern").

When I first released Catch, back in 2010, C++11 was still referred to as C++1x (or even C++0x!) and the final release date was still uncertain. So Catch was written to target C++03. It used a few "modern" idioms of the time - but the modernity was intended more as being a break from the past - where most C++ frameworks were just reimplementations of JUnit in C++. So I think the label was somewhat justified at the time.

Of course since then C++11 has not only been standardised but is fully, or nearly fully, implemented by many leading, mainstream, compilers. I think adoption is still not high enough, at this point, that I'd be willing to drop support for C++03 in Catch (there is even an actively maintained fork for VC6!). But it is enough that the baseline for what constitutes "modern C++" has definitely moved on. And now C++14 is here too - pushing it even further forward.

"Modern" is not what it used to be

What does it mean to be a "Modern C++ Test Framework" these days anyway? Well the most obvious thing for the user is probably the use of lambdas. Along with a few other features, lambdas allow for a lot of what previously required macros to be done in pure C++. I'm usually the first to hold this up as A Good Thing. In a moment I'll get to why I don't think it's necessarily as good a step as you might think.

But before I get to that; one other thing: For me, as a framework author, the biggest difference C++11/14 would make to something like Catch would be in the internals. Large chunks of code could be removed, reduced or at least cleaned up. The "no dependencies" policy means that Catch has complete implementations of things like shared pointers, optional types and function objects - as well as many things that must be done the long way round (such as iterating collections - I long for range for loops - or at least BOOST_FOREACH).

The competition

I've come across three frameworks that I'd say qualify as truly trying to be "modern C++ test frameworks". I'm sure there are others - and I've not really even used these ones extensively - but these are the ones I'll reference in this discussion. The three frameworks are:

  • Lest - by Martin Moene, an active contributor to Catch - and partly based on some Catch ideas - re-imagined for a C++11 world.
  • Bandit - this is the one mentioned in the Hacker News comment I kicked off with
  • Mettle - I saw this in a tweet from @MeetingCpp last week and it's what kicked off the train of thought that led me to this post

The case for test case macros

But why did I say that the use of lambdas is not such a good idea? Actually I didn't quite say that. I think lambdas are a very good idea - and in many ways they would certainly clean up at least the mechanics of defining and registering test cases and sections.

Before lambdas C++ had only one place you could write a block of imperative code: in a function (or method). That means that, in Catch, test cases are really just functions - which must have a function signature - including a name (which we hide - because in Catch the test name is a string). Those functions must be captured somehow. This is done by passing a pointer to the function to the constructor of a small class - who's sole purposes is to forward the function pointer onto a global registry. Later, when the tests are being run, the registry is iterated and the function pointers invoked.

So a test case like this:

    TEST_CASE( "test name", "[tags]" )
    {
        /* ... */
    }

...written out in full (after macro expansion) looks something like:

    static void generatedFunctionName();
    namespace{ ::Catch::AutoReg generatedNameAutoRegistrar
        (   &generatedFunctionName, 
       	    ::Catch::SourceLineInfo( __FILE__, static_cast<std::size_t>( __LINE__ ) ), 
            ::Catch::NameAndDesc( "test name", "[tags]") ); 
    }
    static void generatedFunctionName()
    {
        /* .... */
    }

(generatedFunctionName is generated by yet another macro, which combines root with the current line number. Because the function is declared static the identifier is only visible in the current translation unit (cpp file), so this should be unique enough)

So there's a lot of boilerplate here - you wouldn't want to write this all by hand every time you start a new test case!

With lambdas, though, blocks of code are now first class entities, and you can introduce them anonymously. So you could write them like:

    Catch11::TestCase( "test name", "[tags]", []() 
    {
        /* ... */
    } );

This is clearly far better than the expanded macro. But it's still noisier than the version that uses the macro. Most of the C++11/14 test frameworks I've looked at tend to group tests together at a higher level. The individual tests are more like Catch's sections - but the pattern is still the same - you get noise from the lambda syntax in the form of the []() or [&]() to introduce the lambda and an extra ); at the end.

Is that really worth worrying about?

Personally I find it's enough extra noise that I think I'd prefer to continue to use a macro - even if it used lambdas under the hood. But it's also small enough that I can certainly see the case for going macro free here.

Assert yourself

But that's just test cases (and sections). Assertions have traditionally been written using macros too. In this case the main reasons are twofold:

  1. It allows the expression evaluation to be wrapped in an exception handler.
  2. It allows us the capture the file and line number to report on.

(1) can arguably be handled in whatever is holding the current lambda (e.g. it or describe in Bandit, suite, subsuite or expect in Mettle). If these blocks are small enough we should get sufficient locality of exception handling - but it's not as tight as the per-expression handling with the macro approach.

(2) simply cannot be done without involving the preprocessor in some way (whether it's to pass __FILE__ and __LINE__ manually, or to encapsulate that with a macro). How much does that matter? Again it's a matter of taste but you get several benefits from having that information. Whether you use it to manually locate the failing assertion or if you're running the reporter in an IDE window that automatically allows you to double-click the failure message to take you to the line - it's really useful to be able to go straight to it. Do you want to give that up in order to go macro free? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Interestingly lest still uses a macro for assertions

Weighing up

So we've seen that a truly modern C++ test framework, using lambdas in particular, can allow you to write tests without the use of macros - but at a cost!

So the other side of the equation must be: what benefit do you get from eschewing the macros?

Personally I've always striven to minimise or eliminate the use of macros in C++. In the early days that was mostly about using const, inline and templates. Now lambdas allow us to address some of the remaining cases and I'm all for that.

But I also tend to associate a much higher "cost" to macro usage when it generates imperative code. This is code that you're likely to find yourself needing to step through in a debugger at runtime - and macros really obfuscate this process. When I use macros it tends to be in declarative code. Code that generates purely declarative statements, or effectively declarative statements (such as the test case function registration code). It tends to always generate the exact same machinery - so should not be sensitive to its inputs in ways that will require debugging.

How do Catch's macros play out in that regard? Well the test case registration macros get a pass. Sections are a grey area - they are on the path of code that needs to be stepped over - and, worse, hide a conditional (a section is really just an if statement on a global variable!). So score a few points down there. Assertions are also very much runtime executable - and are frequently on the debugging path! In fact stepping into expressions being asserted on in Catch tests can be quite a pain as you end up stepping into some of the "hidden" calls before you get to the expression you supplied (in Visual Studio, at least, this can be mitigated by excluding the Catch namespace using the StepOver registry key).

Now, interestingly, the use of macros for the assertions was never really about C++03 vs C++11. It was about capturing extra information (file/ line) and wrapping in a try-catch. So if you're willing to make that trade-off there's no reason you can't have non-macro assertions even in C++03!

Back to the future

One of my longer arcs of development on Catch (that I edge towards on each refactoring) is to decouple the assertion mechanism from the guts of the test runner. You should be able to provide your own assertions that work with Catch. Many other test frameworks work this way and it allows them to be much more flexible. In particular it will allow me to decouple the matcher framework (and maybe allow third-party matchers to work with Catch).

Of course this would also allow macro-less assertions to be used (as it happens the assertions in bandit and mettle are both matcher-like already).

So, while I think Catch is committed to supporting C++03 for some time yet, that doesn't mean there is no scope for modernising it and keeping it relevant. And, modern or not, I still believe it is the simplest C++ test framework to get up and running with, and the least noisy to work with.