[boost] Interest check: Boost.Mock

Subject: [boost] Interest check: Boost.Mock
From: Peter Bindels (dascandy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-06-10 05:43:55

Hi all,

Over the past three-quarters of a year I've been working (with three
friends) on a mocking framework for C++. In our vision, it would be a good
complement to Boost.Test for testing classes separate from interfaces
required - it would improve the ability to unit-test the classes that tie
others together and that implement higher-level algorithms.

It does this by creating an object that is "derived" from a given class at
runtime, and replacing the functions with functions that redirect to
verifying logic. The verifying logic uses basic structures to record
expectations and to verify they happened. These ways of creating an object
at runtime and modifying it are highly compiler dependant but remarkably
portable - as it runs on at least 3 different compiler series (GCC, MSVC,
EDG-based) and 5 platforms (Windows XP, Windows CE, Linux, QNX, bare
platform), with few modifications.

The library has been released under the name "Hippo Mocks" already. I'm
interested in submitting it to Boost for three reasons. First of all, I
believe that there may be obvious or very interesting optimizations or
expansions I do not notice. Second, as Christian has elaborated on already,
having the Boost tag on the project makes it more noticed and more used. As
it has taken quite a bit of time from me already I would like people to use
it. Third, Boost.Test allows testing code but does not support mocking. In
the environment of unit testing, anything that is not a base library
benefits from mocking by abstracting away details that are irrelevant and
that will break your test unnecessarily.

For Boost the main changes would be superficial in the naming and in using
more default libraries instead of a new implementation. For Hippo Mocks I've
decided to make no assumptions in anything over C++98 so there's a full
Tuple implementation and so on.

If there's an interest I'll spend the evening porting the code to qualify
for the Boost coding norms and upload it to the vault (if I can - but that
should be OK). I would like you to take a look at the code and tell me what
you think of it.

Thanks for your time.

Kind regards,
Peter Bindels