Tarpaulin (or cargo-tarpaulin) is a code coverage tool for Rust. Last year was pretty busy with the launch of the project and the rush of issues as people started to use it so this is just a chance to look at what’s new with version 0.6.0 and what’s planned for the rest of this year.

2017 A year in review

So in 2017 I started tarpaulin, largely because I realised it’s probably the best project name I’ve came up with, but mainly because I found the process of using kcov with Rust frustrating. Language agnostic coverage tools tend to only work properly with C, struggle with abstractions, and setup is fiddly. Whereas building a coverage tool targeted at a specific language means you can utilise tooling in that language to make things easier - Cargo for example.

So after my initial May release tarpaulin can now:

Send coverage reports to popular coverage sites (coveralls and codecov)

Generate cobertural xml reports

Include unused templated code in results (kcov doesn’t do this for Rust or C++)

Handle unused inlined functions

Trim out a lot of false positives that show up such as module imports and using aliases

aliases Include or exclude packages

Ignore certain tests

Work on multithreaded code (with the --no-count option, now a default)

option, now a default) Tarpaulin ran on Windows via docker and new releases are now available on docker-hub

syntex_syntax to syn

As syntex_syntax is unmaintained the introduction of nested import statements wasn’t able to be handled and caused a panic. Because of this tarpaulin had to move to syn for syntax analysis. It also had to make use of semver exempt code to get the source positions from syn.

Because of this you may need RUSTFLAGS="--cfg procmacro2_semver_exempt" when running cargo install for tarpaulin 0.6.0. So just type the following:

RUSTFLAGS="--cfg procmacro2_semver_exempt" cargo install cargo-tarpaulin

Another alternative is to use the install script to download the binary from the github releases for travis or one of the docker images available.

2018 What’s planned

So in 2018 there’s a few different features and improvements planned but I’ll focus on the big ones.

HTML Reports

Tarpaulin will have it’s own HTML report format it can generate for people who aren’t using codecov or coveralls as a web interface to their coverage results. These reports will be able to show coverage at a folder level, individual file level and also let you inspect the source and see it annotated with the results.

Branch and condition coverage

So a couple of open source tools provide branch coverage, none provide condition coverage. I’m aiming straight for a technical solution that works for condition coverage, this is harder than just branch coverage but has some benefits. It means tarpaulin will be capable of branch coverage and open the door to Modified Condition Decision Coverage (MCDC) something I’ve only seen in expensive closed source tools. MCDC coverage is significantly more useful as a metric and mandated in some safety critical software projects.

Currently, I’m deciding between attempting to tackle all three at once or start with branch coverage. Because of the need to analyse boolean subconditions for condition and MCDC coverage they’re harder to implement than branch coverage. However, implementing a system that can provide condition coverage can provide branch and MCDC without extra complexity in the tracing and interpretation of the programs.

There may also be a blog post in the future going into the different types of coverage and explaining the pros and cons of them!

Performance

Instrumenting code with breakpoints and stepping through logging the coverage is obviously a slow process. There are a number of flags in tarpaulin to mitigate the performance issues and by using syn I’ve aimed to remove unnecessary breakpoints to speed up runs. In 2018 I’d like to improve the performance further, potentially by running test executables in parallel or simpler means.

Other Improvements

As the year goes on I’d like to continue to close issues improving accuracy and consistency across projects of different types and different distros. And a lot of that work will be by closing issues.

One issue I’d really like to see closed is #23, although that might be reliant on rust#35061. Likewise, #13 coverage of doctests will be another tricky one to close.

Community contributions

In 2018 the aim is to remove any barriers to entry for people interested in contributing and I’m going to try and start having mentored issues among other initiatives. I’ve already made some significant headway into this by refactoring the code to abstract away some of the details of ptrace and adding more tests and docs. This work will continue as the year goes on.

Any help is appreciated and with that in mind I’d like to thank people who have contributed this year. So thanks to: