Unity Test API VS doctest

There are plenty of good IDE in 2024 for any languages; C included.

For the IDE itself, the big choices are between Jetbrains CLion and VSCode. If you are familiar with Jetbrains product for another language, stick to it. Same for VSCode, if you’re use to it, just install the right plugins.

I personally prefer Jetbrains product because it is working without selecting/installing all the plugins. Some people likes to tweak their environment. So, I don’t use a lot of plugins on the IDE.

I use VSCode only when I have multiple stack in the same project (typically Flutter project which include the Dart part and the native part). In that case, VSCode is more practical.

In the embedded world, there is also Kiel for ARM embedded development. (https://www.keil.com/). I was never be able to use it. It is really unnatural to me but a lot of embedded C developers love it.

Regarding the dev tools, I prefer to use tools that are multi platform and widely used. So, the dev tools include CMake, make and GNU C compiler. It is a pretty common toolkit that covered my needs so far.

Unit tests are written with Unity Test Framework (https://github.com/ThrowTheSwitch/Unity). It is simple and allow to be executed on the target if required; which is practical for embedded development.

Here is the github repo link of Unity: https://github.com/ThrowTheSwitch/Unity

You shouldn't need a configuration file to write tests with Unity. You are using Unity from Unity on Github right? You can use YAML files to along with some helper scripts Unity and related tools provide, but it doesn't sound like you are there yet.

First, for context, as part of my internship, I'm writing unit tests for functions from a hardware manufacturer provided C++ library. This particular code is testing if the relevant function returns a unique location ID for each hardware device. The test assert macro I'm using is from the Unity test framework C library.

I use Unity Fixtues + FFF + CException framework.

Edit: I also tried Googling "list of Unity test framework macros" and found this, which is kind of helpful, but still doesn't actually explain how the correct syntax for specific macros or precisely what they do. I guess basically, I'm looking for something similar to the entries on cppreference.com, but for the Unity macros instead of the standard library functions for C++.

I know Unity is used in the embedded industry, I also use it for my own personal projects. It’s great and does everything I need.

If you're using the ESP-IDF framework, it already comes with Unity. It's easy to use, and you have the Test Driven Development for Embedded C book as reference.

I use the Unity Test Framework: https://github.com/ThrowTheSwitch/Unity

catch2 has become fairly bloated. doctest takes all of the best parts of catch2 without all the bloat and the end result is a test framework that is literally over 10x faster than catch2. It's also like 90% compatible with catch2 so porting your tests to it is pretty easy.

Especially if you have a build process that always runs your unit tests, it's nice to have a very fast test/compile/debug loop.

https://github.com/doctest/doctest

I have never used "tools" for unit-tests, only web sites that show the results of the tests or code coverage. For C++ I prefer https://github.com/doctest/doctest but most companies I worked for use Catch2.

Do the README and tutorial not explain it well enough? It's a framework for automated unit testing.

This is, honestly, super easy to get going. Nowadays you have a ton of libraries and more-than-decent build systems. With Meson/CMake and Conan/Vcpkg I can set up a project with testing in 3 minutes. Also, I think that at the end of the day you want your tests to live somewhere else. But if you want to embed them, you also have https://github.com/doctest/doctest.

Write some tests. They can find bugs early and give you confidence that your code works so far. That doesn't have to be anything fancy, e.g. with doctest:

Keep in mind https://github.com/doctest/doctest/issues/554. Also, doctest lacks: - Matchers - Data generators - Benchmarking - ...

Your requirements can easily simulated on paper (like increase the speed once, twice, ...), then translated to unit-tests with a framework like https://github.com/doctest/doctest.

For stuff like this which is very easy to test (very predefined input vs output), I highly suggest using some testing framework. Catch2 is great, but there is also doctest and good ole googletest. If you do this, it would also be a great intro to CI, where you do some plumbing on github or gitlab where every commit causes a build to happen on their servers and run through the unit tests, and if it passes it gets merged into master.