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

[Jeff Law <law at redhat dot com>]

On 11/26/2015 05:37 AM, Bernd Schmidt wrote:
> 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?
I'm not aware of any such restriction, but I'm not a C++ guru.

David, what's the reason for avoiding dynamic memory allocation here?


> > 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.
My problem with priorities is that it's really just a poor man's 
substitution for dependency analysis. And in my experience, it usually 
fails.


> 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.
I favor run-all over run-to-first-failure as long as we don't have good 
dependency analysis to order the tests.   That in turn tends to imply 
that each test ought to have a pass/fail indicator.

If we had good dependency analysis, then run-to-first-failure would be 
my preference.

Jeff