[Haskell-cafe] quickcheck for compiler testing

[David Feuer]

I was wondering the same thing about testing GHC itself. In particular, the
test case for Trac #9964 (a subtle code generator crash) seems like it
could conceivably be small enough for QuickCheck to have come up with.
Although I can see why good properties would be hard to formulate (and
some/many/most important ones are impossible to check in general), "does
not quickly trigger a GHC panic" should be a very easy one.
On Feb 16, 2015 11:53 AM, "Maurizio Vitale" <mrz.vtl at gmail.com> 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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