Basic Unit Test

Basic Unit Test (BUT) is a simple unit-test driver. The idea is collect related unit tests into a test suite that is compiled and linked into a shared library (DLL, .so, whatever). The test driver is a just a command-line tool that accepts paths to shared libraries. It will load them and run the tests within.

Test libraries (DLLs) are expected to export one function, BUTTestSuite *but_test_suite() that returns the address of the BUTTestSuite object defined therein.

It currently builds only on Windows with Visual Studio 2017, 2019, or 2020. It will probably build and run on other operating systems with other C compilers, I just haven't included build scripts/tools for those, yet.

How to Build

The initial build system relies on Visual Studio (2017, 2019, or 2022) and the .cmd scripts under build/cmd/. all.cmd builds both the exceptions library, the test driver,but.exe, and unit tests for both. exceptions.cmd and but.cmd build their respective components. The exceptions.cmd script will also build but.exe if the test option is passed in so its unit tests can be executed. All build artifacts are written to various subdirectories of the target directory.

Those three build scripts accept the following commands:

• build: build the project. May be combined with release or debug (default).
• debug: build without optimizations (default).
• release: build with optimizations.
• cleanall: delete all build artifacts for the configured compiler.
• clean: delete all build artifacts for the debug/release configuration.
• cleanplat: delete all build artifacts for the 32-bit/64-bit configuration.
• x64: specifies a 64-bit build (default).
• x86: specifies a 32-bit build.
• win32: specifies a 32-bit build.
• test: build the current configuration and run all unit tests.
• timed: run ctime for timed builds. The .ctm files are written to the metrics folder. N.B.: build ctime first.
• vs2017: use Visual Studio 2017. The scripts will search for MS Build, Pro, and Community Edition in that order.
• vs2019: use Visual Studio 2019. The scripts will search for MS Build, Pro, and Community Edition in that order.
• vs2022: use Visual Studio 2022. The scripts will search for MS Build, Pro, and Community Edition in that order.
• verbose: Display details of steps during the build process.
• trace: Display the values of these options.-

Run the Examples

I still need to create some examples outside of the code itself. In the meantime, open a Windows command prompt, navigate to the root of the repo and run build\cmd\all.cmd test to build and execute all of the unit tests for the exceptions library and the BUT test driver itself. You can run build\cmd\all.cmd test clean to first delete the build artifacts, then rebuild everything and run the tests. The order of test and clean doesn't matter. Similarly, to create a release build and run all of the tests, run build\cmd\all.cmd test release. To delete all build artifacts, simply run build\cmd\all.cmd cleanall.

Project Status

It works. Examples and build scripts to use clang/llvm instead of VS/MSBuild will follow before too long.

Notes

• config.cmd sets environment variables for debug and release compiler and linker options.
• options.cmd processes the commands for the build scripts.
• setup.cmd sets some environment variables based on some of the commands passed to the build scripts.
• shell.cmd has common/default install paths for supported versions of Visual Studio and MSBuild. I will replace these hardcoded paths with the output of vswhere.exe, a tool for locating and listing installed versions of VS and MSBuild.