datadriven VS base32h-tests

Table driven tests are a lot better than a bunch of imperative tests but they rapidly become unwieldy to debug, maintain, and evolve. Their readability often isn’t great.

If you’re using go, check out https://github.com/cockroachdb/datadriven. It takes a little bit of effort to craft a testing dsl, but it is so worth it.

Also, snapshot style testing where the test writes out its expectations and you just inspect it and save it (part of datadriven) is wonderful.

I’ve been using insta in rust lately and it’s some of what I want but not quite datadriven.

I’ve found the datadriven[1] testing approach in go to be quite effective. The idea is that you leverage a standardized file structure to construct a little DSL for testing your code. This allows you to write expressive tests that print the state of the code and then look at it. Rewrite is also very powerful.

This is all inspired by the sqllite logic test framework.

[1]: https://github.com/cockroachdb/datadriven

I'm fond of taking this a step further and actually offloading the test cases to a separate language-agnostic file, then have implementations' test harnesses read cases from that file. The Ruby gem for Base32H¹ does exactly this to test the encoder/decoder logic, pulling the test cases from CSV files in a separate repo² included as a Git submodule. One of these days I need to port the other reference implementations over to using the tests repo, but once that's done I'll be able to update the test cases in one place and they'll automatically work everywhere.

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¹ https://github.com/Base32H/base32h.rb/tree/master/spec

² https://github.com/Base32H/base32h-tests