[PD-dev] Unit tests

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Sep 28, 2011, at 3:13 PM, Marvin Humphrey wrote:

> (moving this thread off of pd-list and onto pd-dev...)
>
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 10:55:09AM -0400, Hans-Christoph Steiner  
> wrote:
>>> I don't see any unit tests.   Are there any?
>>
>> There isn't really any unified test method.  I think the zexy library
>> has some,
>
> I looked at zexy's system to see what testing framework it used, in  
> the hopes
> that Pd Vanilla could use the same one.  But zexy is using its own  
> custom rig
> and zexy is under the GPL, so I'm still looking for other solutions.
>
>> and someone else recently starting writing a test framework in Lua.
>
> Hmm, it's always good to have something rather than nothing, but it  
> seems
> desirable to have a test framework written in Tcl, C or Pd rather  
> than to add
> Lua as a dependency.
>
> Writing a simple testing framework for imperative code is easy.   
> (I've written
> two and hacked on several.)  Gui testing is much harder, so my  
> initial thought
> is to just avoid it altogether and focus on imperative testing.
>
> [ ... /me browses web, discovers tcltest ... ]
>
> Hmm, wouldn't tcltest be the obvious framework to use?
>
>    http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl/TclCmd/tcltest.htm

>> But regular automated unit tests is something that we sorely need.
>
> In the abstract, I'm interested in this.  Writing some test cases  
> would be a
> great way for me to improve my skills with both Tcl and Pd.
>
> Any suggestions about areas of Pd that are particularly suitable for  
> unit
> testing?

I think that audio tests would be the best way to start.  Basically  
generate some audio to an table/array, then compare it to the expected  
result.  There are a number of objects that do type-punning to speed  
things up.  Modern compilers with their vectorization and other  
optimziations don't like type punning, so its a common source of errors.

.hc


>> What we do have is a farm of dev/build servers which you can get ssh
>> access to.
>>
>> http://puredata.info/docs/developer/PdLab
>
> Cool, that's a great resource!
>
> Marvin Humphrey
>
>
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