Cover

Cover is a framework library to easily create test suites for C (and thus C++).

Cover is declarative and uses the global symbol cover_suite to find the user-defined set of tests. It defines its custom set of signal handlers and calls appropriate reporting backends to wrap the tests results. It enforces reports under a resilient executable which would not just crash when a test fails under heavy circumstances (eg. stack overflows).

Keep in mind

Individual test suites should aim for minute-duration testing (which could be unit tests, functional tests...). Cover makes efforts to ensure total completion of the test suite, and executes test cases sequentially. Tests should not trigger process termination, and should rely on cover to fail/terminate, thus allowing cover to correctly call finalization triggers, complete reports and resource cleanups gracefully.

Examples

A set of simple examples is provided with this repository, three examples showing how to use some features of cover:

• assert: Using assertions inside tests to test invariants. And how to setup initialization and/or a finalization hooks to free resources for the test suite.
• signal: Shows how cover catches common failure signals to enforce test suite completion and meaningful reportings.

A cover test executable must explicitly activate its reporting backends when called. For example, if you are in your build directory and built the assert test example:

test/assert -pretty - # Activate the 'pretty' backend with option '-' (standard output)

Backends

Cover dynamically finds its backends, when an argument is provided on the command line (like -pretty in the previous example). When detected, it looks up the associated cover_backend_<backend>_init initialization and cover_backend_<backend>_report reporting function symbols. The initialization is done before the init hook, and thus is allowed to fail before the test suite execution begins. It allows defining custom reporting backends alongside any project's test suite without having to recompile libcover or install anything.

• Fancy/colorful output.
• TAP (Test anything protocol).
• JUnit XML report.

Configure, build and install

Meson is used to configure, build and install the library:

meson setup build
meson compile -C build
meson install -C build

Documentation

To do.