[Haskell-cafe] quickcheck for compiler testing

[Maurizio Vitale]

By 'test size reduction' I mean the 'shrink' function. It seems to me (as I
said, first Haskell program and no experience with quickcheck) that it
works nicely with a topdown generation of the test, but I don't see how to
easily generate correct programs that way.

Even if you cannot release your tests, maybe you can help me with a very
simple case. Consider a trivial AST. A program is a possibly nested block.
Each block is a bunch of declarations of variables and some use of them

data Block = Block [Declaration] [Statement]

data Declaration = Var String String

data Statement = Statement Block | Use String


How one would generate things like:

Block [Var "a" "int"] [Use "a"] -- here a is declared in the same block

Block [] [Statement Block [Var "s" "int"] [Statement Block [] [Use "s"]]]
-- here s is declared in some other visible scope


etc.

Or am I trying to approach the problem from the wrong angle?



On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 12:02 PM, Andrey Chudnov <achudnov at gmail.com> wrote:

>  I use QuichCheck for compiler testing where I generate random, but
> well-formed programs and check some high-level syntactic properties on
> results. The QuickCheck instance is open-source (see language-ecmascript),
> but the compiler-test code is closed-source at this time. Still, I found
> that it's not the ultimate answer: many properties are hard to formalize,
> so I have to resort to unit tests. I'm not sure what you mean by "how this
> would play with test size reduction". I think it's worth giving a try, but
> keep in mind that you might still need to use unit tests.
>
> Let me know if you have any questions.
>
> /Andrey
>
>
> On 02/16/2015 11:53 AM, Maurizio Vitale wrote:
>
> I'm starting to work on my first real haskell program (I've only RWH
> exercises under my belt) and wondering whether people use quickcheck at all
> for compiler testing.
>
>  I've seen uses of quickcheck for testing parsers, but I'm interested in
> generating well-formed programs (e.g. random programs with all declarations
> in reasonable random places). This could be used to test passes other than
> parsing (or even parsing, for languages that needs to distinguish
> identifiers, like the 'typedef' problem in C/C++).
>
>  The only thing I can think of, is to use quickcheck for randomly
> generating statements, go over them and figure out free variables (incl.
> functions) and generate declarations in random places for them. But I'm not
> sure how this would play with test size reduction and doesn't look like a
> nice solution anyhow.
>
>  Any idea or pointers to examples? or should I give up on quickcheck for
> this and just do direct testing?
>
>  Thanks,
>
>    Maurizio
>
>
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