December 2023 – time is the answer

2023-12-072023-12-21

Using assert calls to check coverage

I heard a great development process idea from Tom Forsyth where he explained that he litters his code with assert(true) to make sure that he hits all the key code paths during early testing.

This got me thinking about asserts and code coverage.

Code coverage is an evil that kills the sole of testers. It is treated as an absolute and they are forced to try to hit 100%. A much more efficient approach is to have humans spend real thinking power about where and what needs to have code coverage checked. Sure this is not black box testing, but a clever mix of black box, API, edge case, and coverage testing is a much better approach.

2023-12-032024-01-23

Compile time functions

While C++ lags behind new languages for support at compile time, there is some ability to get some of the advantages.

A simple case is to create a allow a runtime function that is simple enough to be run at compile time. This has the nice feature that if the function is not able to be used at compile time it will still work at runtime. Thus this can be done for many functions:

static constexpr u32 function(const char* const int)

However this flexibility also has the problem that you cant be sure it will be run at run time.