Re: [PATCH 01/15] Selftest framework (unittests v4)

[Bernd Schmidt <bschmidt at redhat dot com>]

On 11/25/2015 11:47 PM, David Malcolm wrote:
> FWIW, the reason I special-cased the linked list was to avoid any
> dynamic memory allocation: the ctors run before main, so I wanted to
> keep them as simple as possible.

Is there any particular reason for this? C++ doesn't disallow memory 
allocation in global constructors, does it?

> Putting the linked list directly into
> those objects means that running the ctors is a simple case of wiring up
> some pointers: the memory is already statically allocated.  (also, one
> thing I want to test is vec<> itself [1]).

Ok so use a C++ list instead of a vec. My days of using C++ for personal 
projects are 15 years in the past so maybe I'm not an authority, but 
that's how I feel the language is supposed to be used - use provided 
data structures rather than coding them up over and over.

> I do want some level of determinism over test ordering, for the sake of
> everyone's sanity.  It's probably simplest to either hardcode the order,
> or have priority levels.  I favor the former (and right now am leaning
> towards a very explicit no-magic approach with no auto-registration,
> given the linker issues I've been seeing with auto-registration).

I guess that works too. Certainly explicit function calls are 
preferrable over #including other C files as a workaround for such a 
problem.

I still wish others would chime in on the rest of the issues we've 
discussed (run to first failure vs. providing elaborate test summaries), 
I want to make my preference clear but I don't want to dictate it.


Bernd