Proposal: free shrinking with QuickCheck

[Reid Draper]

On Nov 22, 2013, at 2:57 PM, Joseph Abrahamson <me at jspha.com> wrote:

> I really like this idea, but I think I’d personally love to see some examples of it in practice. 75% of my Arbitrary instances are “traverse arbitrarily” and 95% of them keep Gen abstract, so I have a good feeling that it’d be possible to implement with relatively small amounts of user pain.

That's been my experience as well, though I haven't even had the 5% where I've had to break the Gen abstraction.

> 
> The thing I wonder about is how often `arbitrary` declarations provide enough information for efficient, meaningful `shrink` declarations. If the two differ it may be more necessary to break into `Gen` to provide the right kind of behavior—which would be increasingly complex.

My experience with both Erlang QuickCheck and simple-check (Clojure) is that it _is_ enough information. In the rare cases it's not, you can always still implement your own logic for shrinking by breaking the Gen abstraction (manipulating the RoseTree yourself).

> 
> I’d love to see some examples of complex generators from simple-check implemented in this style. As an ugly example I frequently run into in my own code, it’s often hard to write a good arbitrary instance for UTCTime—it’s very domain specific what defines a good arbitrary time. Would such kinds of complex generator code also lead to a nice shrink function? Or would it require something more complex?

 I think a powerful example is an 'any' generator I have in simple-check, which will generate arbitrary Clojure values [1]. It's constructed in exactly the same way as you'd do it with today's QuickCheck, but it also shrinks as well as a hand-written shrink algorithm. (I've found edge-cases in Clojure's reader/writer this way).

[1]  https://github.com/reiddraper/simple-check/blob/v0.5.3/src/simple_check/generators.clj#L525-L553

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