doctest VS benchmark

Compare doctest vs benchmark and see what are their differences.

doctest

The fastest feature-rich C++11/14/17/20/23 single-header testing framework (by doctest)

benchmark

A microbenchmark support library (by google)
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doctest benchmark
19 19
5,523 8,325
1.8% 2.0%
0.0 8.8
13 days ago 4 days ago
C++ C++
MIT License Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

doctest

Posts with mentions or reviews of doctest. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-07.
  • Unit testing tool suggestions
    2 projects | /r/learnprogramming | 7 May 2023
    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.
  • Memory Safety in the D Programming Language (Part 2 of N)
    2 projects | /r/programming | 8 Oct 2022
    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.
  • Testing framework Catch2 3.0 final released
    3 projects | /r/cpp | 17 May 2022
    Keep in mind https://github.com/doctest/doctest/issues/554. Also, doctest lacks: - Matchers - Data generators - Benchmarking - ...
  • The Lisp Curse
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2022
    I like working in C++, after a decade of working in Java, Python, Javascript and Clojure, I find working in C++ (which I learned before these other languages) to be quite fun and pleasant, at least with relatively modern C++.

    I've been, on and off, working on a little toy game engine, for a few years. Its a mix of keeping up with C++ advancements, learning various concepts like physically based rendering, and just the fun of crafting a big project, with no constraints other than my time and ability, no deadlines, no expectation of releasing anything. Its cathartic and enjoyable. I really do enjoy it.

    Last September, I got frustrated with something I was working on in a more serious capacity. It was some server software, it responded to HTTP requests, it accessed third party services over HTTP and Websockets, it talked to a Postgres database. Overall it was an event driven system that transformed data and generated actions that would be applied by talking to third party services. The "real" version was written in Clojure and it worked pretty well. I really like Clojure, so all good.

    But because I was frustrated with some things about how it ran and the resources it took up, I wondered what it would be like if I developed a little lean-and-mean version in C++. So I gave it a try as a side project for a few weeks. I used doctest[1] for testing, immer[2] for Clojure-like immutable data structures, [3] lager for Elm-like application state and logic management, Crow[4] for my HTTP server, ASIO[5] and websocketpp[6] for Websockets, cpp-httplib[7] as a HTTP client and PGFE[8] for Postgres, amongst some other little utility libraries. I also wrote it in a Literate Programming style using Entangled[9], which helped me keep everything well documented and explained.

    For the most part, it worked pretty well. Using immer and lager helped keep the logic safe and to the point. The application started and ran very quickly and used very little cpu or memory. However, as the complexity grew, especially when using template heavy libraries like lager, or dealing with complex things like ASIO, it became very frustrating to deal with errors. Template errors even on clang became incomprehensible and segmentation faults when something wasn't quite right became pretty hard to diagnose. I had neither of these problems working on my game engine, but both became issues on this experiment. After a few weeks, I gave up on it. I do think I could have made it work and definitely could go back and simplify some of the decisions I made to make it more manageable, but ultimately, it was more work than I had free time to dedicate to it.

    So my experience was that, yes, you can write high level application logic for HTTP web backends in C++. You can even use tools like immer or lager to make it feel very functional-programming in style and make the application logic really clean. Its not hard to make it run efficiently both in terms of running time and memory usage, certainly when comparing to Clojure or Python. However, I found that over all, it just wasn't as easy or productive as either of those languages and I spent more time fighting the language deficiencies, even with modern C++, than I do when using Clojure or Python.

    I think I would think very long and hard before seriously considering writing a web backend in C++. If I had the time, I'd love to retry the experiment but using Rust, to see how it compares.

    [1] https://github.com/doctest/doctest

    [2] https://github.com/arximboldi/immer

    [3] https://github.com/arximboldi/lager

    [4] https://github.com/CrowCpp/crow

    [5] https://think-async.com/Asio/

    [6] https://www.zaphoyd.com/projects/websocketpp/

    [7] https://github.com/yhirose/cpp-httplib

    [8] https://github.com/dmitigr/pgfe

    [9] https://entangled.github.io/

  • C++17 python like print function
    4 projects | /r/embedded | 9 Mar 2022
    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.
  • How to unit test
    8 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 9 Feb 2022
    doctest is my favorite framework. Really simple to use, header only, supports compile-time tests, lots of features and it works well with cmake.
    8 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 9 Feb 2022
    I haven't used it, but I've heard that doctest is also quite good: https://github.com/doctest/doctest
  • Unit testing and mocking for c++
    6 projects | /r/cpp | 19 Oct 2021
    I usually use doctest with trompeloeil.
  • Best IDE For C++ OpenGL?
    2 projects | /r/opengl | 14 Sep 2021
    I use doctest for unit testing.
  • Python 3 Types in the Wild: A Tale of Two Type Systems [pdf]
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Apr 2021
    Even aside from deliberate backwards-compatibility breaks in the standard, compilers sometimes break compatibility. Both MSVC and GCC 11 have changed their header file transitive includes within the past few years, causing projects (like doctest and Qt5) to stop compiling because they forgot to include headers, which built fine in the past but not anymore. IDK if it's "very common", but it's definitely happening in the wild.

    MSVC: https://github.com/onqtam/doctest/issues/183

    GCC:

    - https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qtbase/-/commit/8252ef5fc6d0430...

    - https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qtbase/-/commit/cb2da673f53815a...

benchmark

Posts with mentions or reviews of benchmark. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-05.
  • How can I check the execution time of a program rendered in SFML?
    3 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 5 Dec 2023
  • How to Perf profile functions?
    3 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 13 Jul 2023
    You can also use a benchmarking library like Google benchmark or similar.
    3 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 13 Jul 2023
  • how do you properly benchmark?
    2 projects | /r/cpp | 20 Feb 2023
    I'm aware of one by Google that I used a couple times, but IMO it's better to capture real runtime data from a fully-operational process than to carve out the benchmarkable bits and test them in isolation, so I track information during program testing and print it all to a log instead of using things like that.
  • Benchmarking my data structure
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 2 Jan 2023
    If you just want to do some quick benchmarks, you can just use std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now(). Call it before the code that you are benchmarking and then immediately after. Take them away and you have your duration. If you want to use a proper benchmarking tool then I can totally recommend Google Benchmark. Fantastic benchmarking tool. Honourable mention would be Quick Bench which is an online tool that uses Google Benchmark.
  • Best accurate way to measure/compare elapsed time in C++
    6 projects | /r/cpp | 5 Jul 2022
  • Don’t Be Scared Of Functional Programming
    4 projects | /r/programming | 16 Feb 2022
    We don't know if it's a lie until we verify it and that's not difficult, you have a quicksort implementation in a couple of languages, you'll need to pass the necessary parameters to show the time needed by a function call to execute to the compiler or interpreter or you may use use a library(like benchmark for C++) and you're good to go.
  • Calculate Your Code Performance
    5 projects | dev.to | 23 Oct 2021
    C++: C++ has quite a number of benchmarking libraries some of the recent ones involving C++ 20's flexibility. The most notable being Google Bench and UT. C does not have many specific benchmarking libraries, but you can easily integrate C code with C++ benchmarking libraries in order to test the performance of your C code.
  • Benchmarking Code
    6 projects | dev.to | 19 Oct 2021
    Google Bench
  • CXXGraph Library Release v0.1.5
    5 projects | dev.to | 25 Aug 2021
    # Check out the library. $ git clone https://github.com/google/benchmark.git # Benchmark requires Google Test as a dependency. Add the source tree as a subdirectory. $ git clone https://github.com/google/googletest.git benchmark/googletest # Go to the library root directory $ cd benchmark # Make a build directory to place the build output. $ cmake -E make_directory "build" # Generate build system files with cmake. $ cmake -E chdir "build" cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ../ # or, starting with CMake 3.13, use a simpler form: # cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -S . -B "build" # Build the library. $ cmake --build "build" --config Release # install library $ sudo cmake --build "build" --config Release --target install

What are some alternatives?

When comparing doctest and benchmark you can also consider the following projects:

Catch - A modern, C++-native, test framework for unit-tests, TDD and BDD - using C++14, C++17 and later (C++11 support is in v2.x branch, and C++03 on the Catch1.x branch)

Google Test - GoogleTest - Google Testing and Mocking Framework

Celero - C++ Benchmark Authoring Library/Framework

Google Mock

hayai - C++ benchmarking framework

Nonius - A C++ micro-benchmarking framework

Boost.Test - The reference C++ unit testing framework (TDD, xUnit, C++03/11/14/17)

CppUTest - CppUTest unit testing and mocking framework for C/C++

easy_profiler - Lightweight profiler library for c++

Unity Test API - Simple Unit Testing for C