First time testing, also with FP Complete

Posted on November 13, 2013

Today I decided to finally start using tests before I get any deeper into my Solar Wind project.

Recently, I saw a new framework called tasty which is meant to replace test-framework. It has HUnit, QuickCheck, and support for even more tests like SmallCheck.

Although I understand the concepts of unit testing already, I learned a bit about how to take advantage of QuickCheck when testing my pure code. My tests so far aren’t very covering, but now I have some experience to make more with ease.

Decomposition

At first, I tried following what I saw on stackoverflow once, where a user suggested using a flag to make everything vieable for tests. This worked, but then I saw why people made Internal modules. It made sense, so I refactored, and it just felt more comfortable.

All Green!

Then I got my tests passing!

I used exitcode-stdio-1.0 . Though I slipped up and thought stdio was studio . A short face-palm and I learned that lesson.

Okay, let’s try this FP Complete!

Then came trying to get it working on FP Complete.

I currently have an academic license, and I might as well try be the guy who gets the bumps (which I report) on his open source project, to help the IDE become a better product.

Getting it to even compile

Since Tasty is not in stackage, but it is in Hackage, I tried to get use the experimental package feature in the settings.

Tried…

Hackage: tasty Hackage: tasty-hunit Hackage: tasty-quickcheck

It complained about not finding Test.Tasty.QuickCheck . This didn’t make much sense. I changed the last line to a manual git checkout and it seemed to function, though it slowed down setup time.

Git: https://github.com/feuerbach/tasty 791cbefbf8ca531b3b27cb07809a04581d38e1c9 quickcheck

Then I was finally able to use it. I hope that the creator is willing to contribute to gettting into stackage and maintaining it.

Execution target

Then came some immense frustration. How do I get the project to recognize the test as an executable target?

I ended up having to edit the .project-settings.yml file manually. Then I started seeing pinks and reds. The module wasn’t expected to be under the name “Test” since it was named Main.hs in my tests directory.

So.. I tried changing it to Test.hs, as well as a rename from module Main where to module Test where . It seemed to be happy, but then Cabal threw a fit.

Cabal wants the module to be Main though! You apparently can’t have a main-is: Anything.hs but in Anything.hs not have it be module Main where …

EDIT (2014-03-21): Thanks to Daniel Martin for pointing out that the FP Complete Haskell Center provides a definition available when running the CPP language extension.

This way, the solution may trivially be

{-# LANGUAGE CPP #-} -- imports here #ifdef FPHC module Test where #else module Main where #endif main :: IO () main = -- do tests here

After much fighting between…

I did send a feature request to have aliases for the FP Complete IDE.

Cabal won. But then in order to run the tests, the drop down for the current executable target is called “Main”.

But wait..

FP Complete says I have failing tests? This doesn’t make sense…

I expect that a lot of what goes on in the FP Complete IDE involves GHCI. So I tried running it there instead of a compiled version.

It turned out that concurrency and timing was the issue–what I tested involved another thread being spawned and carrying out a STM transaction.

But the errors didn’t go away. I just happened to test the exact opposite condition. So I flipped that around, then all green in GHCI!

Commit.. test on FP Complete, oh good! It’s all green! Well, it doesn’t have color support, but it said all tests passed.

Oh, I am forgetting something.. The compiled test!

Wait.. What now!?

I pondered and then realized that in the compiled -threaded environment, it probably never got the time to spawn and complete the transactions I was testing for. Namely, declaring thread ownership of a resource.

I threw in a few threadDelay 1000 which is in microseconds, mind you.

EDIT: I’ve solved this without thread delays now. I used my sleepOnSTM method which listened for a signal on changing a Nothing to a Just () .

Tada!

Make sure you test your concurrent stuff in both GHCI and compiled to ensure that you aren’t missing something obvious!

Conclusions

Using cpp-flags and cabal flags to hide nothing when testing just doesn’t feel clean. I find that making an Internal module method satisfies the needs and seems to be the de-facto standard from other packages I’ve seen on Hackage.

Tasty was a good first experience for testing. When searching for test-framework related things, the reddit post mentioned that the current test-framework project seems rather abandoned.

I found that QuickCheck encourages complete extraction of logic from IO-like things as possible. The ability to combine different tests like HUnit and QuickCheck seamlessly to be exciting and encouraging to go into TDD.

Tasty also supports BDD with Hspec though it doesn’t really compare much to Cucumber. I do not have experience with cucumber to say if it is worth it or not, though a template haskell version would be pretty radical.

FP Complete was nice to work with in that it’s faster at notifying you of small mistypes and type system issues as you are typing. Though I sent in two feature requests yesterday, a bug today, and I think two other feature requests as well today. One related to better testing support for individual functions as you edited them.

I would really encourage use of it, and if you can, pay for it. I really believe in what FP Complete is doing, and I hope to contribute to the haskell ecosystem for server and web development.