ansi-test VS hypothesis

I have applied it to testing Common Lisp implementations, but there has been much work on applying it to other languages (most famously C and Javascript.)

I applied the following techniques:

(1) Generate random valid well defined programs and see (a) if they crash the compiler, (b) cause different CL implementations to produce different outputs, (c) when modified (by addition of randomly generated optimization directives or valid type declarations) they still produce the same output. This is differential testing, which was used by McKeeman at DEC in the 1990s to test C compilers, and later improved (again, on C compilers) by Yang, Chan, Eide, and Regehr at U. of Utah (csmith, creduce).

Since a running lisp image can generate and compile functions internally (this IS lisp, after all), the testing loop can be very fast. Since 2003 I have run this on and off for many billions of iterations on desktop and laptop machines on various CL implementations, now mainly on SBCL. Most of the test input reduction is handled automatically, which is a big help.

(2) Generate random possibly invalid code by mutating or recombining snippets drawn from a large corpus of code, to see if it crashes the compiler (in CL implementations where the compiler is promised to never respond to bad code by signaling an error.) This was also the approach jsfunfuzz took on Javascript.

(3) Extensive fuzzing of calls to standard functions in CL, using random generation of input values and random generation of valid type declarations, with the invariant being that the same values should be computed (and the compiler not fail.) This is a specialization of (1), but was sufficiently different that the bugs it found were not the same.

Examples of tests produced by (1) and (3) over an early period when this was being developed. Each caused a failure in some CL implementation: https://github.com/pfdietz/ansi-test/blob/master/misc/misc.l...

See also the various bugs I've reported against SBCL over the years, many of which come from this testing. https://bugs.launchpad.net/~paul-f-dietz

The experience with this sort of testing of compilers (in any language) is that if the compiler (free or commercial) has never been subjected to it, it will immediately find bugs in the compiler.

Hypothesis for Property-Based Testing: Hypothesis is a Python library facilitating property-based testing. It offers a distinct advantage by generating a wide array of input data based on specified properties or invariants within the code. The perks of Hypothesis include:

But then add tests! Tests for LaTeX equations that had never been executable as code.

https://github.com/HypothesisWorks/hypothesis :

> Hypothesis is a family of testing libraries which let you write tests parametrized by a source of examples. A Hypothesis implementation then generates simple and comprehensible examples that make your tests fail. This simplifies writing your tests and makes them more powerful at the same time, by letting software automate the boring bits and do them to a higher standard than a human would, freeing you to focus on the higher level test logic.

> This sort of testing is often called "property-based testing", and the most widely known implementation of the concept is the Haskell library QuickCheck, but Hypothesis differs significantly from QuickCheck and is designed to fit idiomatically and easily into existing styles of testing that you are used to, with absolutely no familiarity with Haskell or functional programming needed.

pgregory.net/rapid is a modern Go property-based testing library initially inspired by the power and convenience of Python's Hypothesis.

Hypothesis to generate dummy data for test.

To create your own test cases, I recommend you use hypothesis-graphql in combination with hypothesis. hypothesis is a property-based testing library. Property-based testing is an approach to testing in which you make assertions about the result of a test given certain conditions and parameters. For example, if you have a mutation that requires a boolean parameter, you can assert that the client will receive an error if it sends a different type. hypothesis-graphql is a GraphQL testing library that knows how to use hypothesis strategies to generate query documents.

The Hypothesis stateful testing code is somewhat self-contained, since it mostly builds on top of internal APIs that already existed.

We've had a lot of success combining that approach with property-based testing (https://github.com/HypothesisWorks/hypothesis) for the query engine at backtrace: https://engineering.backtrace.io/2020-03-11-how-hard-is-it-t... .

Systems I've used for this include https://agda.readthedocs.io/en/v2.6.0.1/getting-started/what... https://coq.inria.fr https://www.idris-lang.org and https://isabelle.in.tum.de

An easier alternative is to try disproving the statement, by executing it on thousands of examples and seeing if any fail. That gives us less confidence than a full proof, but can still be better than traditional "there exists" tests. This is called property checking or property-based testing. Systems I've used for this include https://hypothesis.works https://hackage.haskell.org/package/QuickCheck https://scalacheck.org and https://jsverify.github.io