this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
38 points (100.0% liked)

Rust

5744 readers
87 users here now

Welcome to the Rust community! This is a place to discuss about the Rust programming language.

Wormhole

!performance@programming.dev

Credits

  • The icon is a modified version of the official rust logo (changing the colors to a gradient and black background)

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] philm@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For example, if I’m writing a compiler for a new toy language

Ok, thinking about it (since I wrote a toy language not so long ago), this is probably a perfect example where unit tests make sense almost everywhere (even for prototyping, say parser).

I think it definitely depends what you're doing, writing unit tests for prototype graphics (engine) code is no fun (and I see no real benefit).

Code readability counts, but I don’t think it’s enough.

I think it depends, For general architecture, E2E or integration tests definitely make sense, for finer-grained code, I think documentation (Rust doc) of the functions in question should be enough to understand what they do (including some examples how to use them, could be tests, often examples (similar as in std rust) in the rust doc are enough IMHO, and otherwise the code itself is the documentation (being able to read code fast is a valuable skill I guess). That obviously doesn't apply for everything (think about highly theoretical computer science or math code), but yeah it depends...

Yeah, I wouldn't bother for graphics code either. For that, I want compilable examples, and that's about it.

I do a lot of math and parsers, and that lends itself very well to unit tests.