[boost] Re: Re: [wave] tool/lib

From: Edward Diener (eddielee_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-03-22 17:13:29

Stefan Seefeld wrote:
> Hartmut Kaiser wrote:
>>
>> Gennadiy Rozental wrote:
>
>
>>> And I do not see why the rest of us should be faced with
>>> library that will never be tested,
>>
>>
>> I don't know why you're so sure this library never will be tested.
>> As I've said during the review I'm working on a test suite, which
>> can be run as an integral part of the regression process. But please
>> consider this to be not a simple task, so I'll need some additional
>> time to fulfill my promise.
>
> I'm presently working on integrating wave as a Cpp backend for
> synopsis.
> In particular, I'm trying to parse (Cpp and C++) boost itself, which
> appears to be a good acid test.
> One of the difficulties testing a tool/library such as wave on a
> large scale seems to me to be the system/platform specific nature of
> such a task. As
> soon as you leave the scale of unit tests, you'll end up with
> system-dependent headers that require knowledge about system
> compilers.
> In synopsis I use some python code that scans the system for available
> compilers and tries to extract predefined macros and include search
> paths.
>
> Would such a facility help as a means for more people to test wave ?
> What I have in mind is a python wrapper script that runs the 'wave'
> tool, forwarding user-defined arguments, but which essentially
> emulates a system compiler in that it predefines macros and include
> paths according to its findings.

Most compilers will publish a list of predefined macros. However some
predefined macros depend on the command line options that one passes to the
compilers when compiling source. So such a tool as yours must take into
account a set of options being passed to it that would change the predefined
macros generated. Also, of course, it is possible that macros can be defined
for a compiler as a command-line option itself.

Similarly the final include path must also take into account any command
line option, most popularly
"-isome_path;some_path_etc", which is passed to the compiler when it is
invoked.

What all this means is that, for any given compiler, a tool such as yours
ideally needs to accept the same set of command-line options as the
particular compiler accepts, and know how to set any macros, as well as a
final composite include path, from those options.