[Rcpp-devel] How to manage testing code for Rcpp based project?

On 12-08-21 09:54 PM, Darren Cook wrote:

RUnit works, but the setup is not the easiest. If someone has ideas for
better solutions, by all means implement those.  Unit testing has helped
us
many times, and I consider it to be a very important part of package
development.

How (or in what aspect) RUnit is better than devtools?

What is "devtools"? Is it a package for testing R software? (it sounds
more generic)

See http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/devtools/ and
https://github.com/hadley/devtools

It aims to make various phases of package development cycle easier, at the
expense of requiring following certain conventions about naming and layout
of source files and directories.

I think what Peng meant as an alternative to Runit is not the devtools
itself, but testthat. See http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/testthat/
and https://github.com/hadley/test_that

Philosophically, testthat draws on Ruby test frameworks like rspec and other
BDD tools. In practical terms, it means that the tests look like this:

context("Basic tests")

test_that("logical tests act as expected", {
  expect_that(TRUE, is_true())
  expect_that(FALSE, is_false())
})

test_that("equality holds", {
  expect_that(5, equals(5))
  expect_that(10, is_identical_to(10))
})

I haven't gotten very deep into using it, but in practical terms I find
there is almost 1:1 correspondence in testing functions ("checkEquals" ->
"expect_that(..., equals(...))", with testthat being a little more readable
but requiring me to turn off ESS's smart-underscore. :-)