[Haskell-cafe] What is the state of the art in testing code generation?

[Tom Ellis]

On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 04:52:22PM -0700, Justin Bailey wrote:
> Do you want to share your library yet? Sounds pretty cool.

It is pretty cool, but needs thorough testing before release :)

> On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 10:58 AM, Tom Ellis
> <tom-lists-haskell-cafe-2013 at jaguarpaw.co.uk> wrote:
> > I am implementing an EDSL that compiles to SQL and I am wondering what is
> > the state of the art in testing code generation.
> >
> > All the Haskell libraries I could find that deal with SQL generation are
> > tested by implementing multiple one-off adhoc queries and checking that when
> > either compiled to SQL or run against a database they give the expected,
> > prespecified result.
> >
> >  * https://github.com/prowdsponsor/esqueleto/blob/master/test/Test.hs
> >  * https://github.com/m4dc4p/haskelldb/blob/master/test/TestCases.hs
> >  * https://github.com/yesodweb/persistent/blob/master/persistent-test/SumTypeTest.hs
> >
> > I couldn't find any tests for groundhog.
> >
> >  * https://github.com/lykahb/groundhog
> >
> > I also had a look at Javascript generators.  They take a similar adhoc,
> > one-off approach.
> >
> >  * https://github.com/valderman/haste-compiler/tree/master/Tests
> >  * https://github.com/faylang/fay/tree/master/tests
> >
> > Is this the best we can do in Haskell?  Certainly it seems hard to use a
> > QuickCheck/SmallCheck approach for this purpose.  Is there any way this kind
> > of testing can be automated or made more robust?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Tom