hedgehog VS smallcheck

Compare hedgehog vs smallcheck and see what are their differences.

hedgehog

Release with confidence, state-of-the-art property testing for Haskell. (by hedgehogqa)

smallcheck

Test your Haskell code by exhaustively checking its properties (by Bodigrim)
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hedgehog smallcheck
3 3
660 133
0.2% -
5.2 4.2
11 days ago 11 months ago
Haskell Haskell
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
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.

hedgehog

Posts with mentions or reviews of hedgehog. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-05-03.
  • Monthly Hask Anything (May 2022)
    4 projects | /r/haskell | 3 May 2022
    I've had some PRs open on hedgehog for one and two months respectively. It looks like the maintainer isn't currently very active, which is fair enough. This isn't about criticizing him, and I'm not trying to take over the repo.
  • Monthly Hask Anything (February 2022)
    4 projects | /r/haskell | 1 Feb 2022
    Testing libraries like hedgehog often run tests in parallel, so you may find related issues to work on.
  • Mutation Testing
    5 projects | /r/programming | 13 Apr 2021
    Haskell has QuickCheck and Hedgehog, and dotnet has both as well. F# is favored, but there's C# interop.

smallcheck

Posts with mentions or reviews of smallcheck. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-27.
  • Generating Well-Typed Terms that are not "Useless" [pdf]
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Oct 2023
    Using laziness to avoid generating parts of an expression until it's needed is a really nice idea. The LazySmallCheck package[1] took this approach, but was limited in the types of data it could produce (e.g. it couldn't generate functions). This was extended by LazySmallCheck2012[2], but that seems to be unmaintained and doesn't work with more recent GHC versions.

    (Note that these are named in reference to SmallCheck[3], which takes the approach of enumerating concrete values in order of "size"; as an alternative to the more widely-used QuickCheck[4], which generates concrete values at random, and tries to "shrink" those which trigger a failure)

    [1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/lazysmallcheck

    [2] https://github.com/UoYCS-plasma/LazySmallCheck2012

    [3] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/smallcheck

    [4] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/QuickCheck

  • [ANN] LeanCheck v1.0.0 – Enumerative Property Testing
    5 projects | /r/haskell | 22 Aug 2022
    Could you compare with https://hackage.haskell.org/package/smallcheck in particular the smallcheck ability "to verify properties for all test cases up to some depth"?
  • Property-based testing #1: What is it anyway?
    1 project | dev.to | 9 Jun 2022
    Another strategy is exhaustive generation. There, all possible values for some type are generated in some well-defined order - typically from "small" to "large" values, and with some upper bound, as once you go past booleans the number of values for most types are (countably) infinite. For example, trying all the integers between -20 and 20 in "zig zag" order 0,1,-1,2,-2,.... SmallCheck for Haskell and SciFe for Scala do this, but this approach is not so well-known. It's a shame as random and exhaustive generation are complementary - if you think of generating values as exploring some large space to find failing tests, random generation is a serendipitous type of exploration, while exhaustive generation is diligently mapping out all the paths in some area.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing hedgehog and smallcheck you can also consider the following projects:

QuickCheck - Automatic testing of Haskell programs.

leancheck - enumerative property-based testing for Haskell

quickcheck-arbitrary-adt - Typeclass for generating a list of each instance of a sum type's constructors

genvalidity - Validity and validity-based testing

FsCheck - Random Testing for .NET

http-test - Tests for HTTP APIs

quickcheck-instances - Instances for QuickCheck classes

fixie - 🚴 Opininated testing framework for mtl style (spies, stubs, and mocks)

tasty - Modern and extensible testing framework for Haskell

smallcheck-series - Orphan Series/CoSeries instances for common types

ghc-prof-flamegraph

tasty-groundhog-converters - Testing Harness for groundhog and groundhog converters.