Re: Replacing Guile test-suite with SRFI-64?

[Maxime Devos]

Op 23-09-2023 om 17:13 schreef Mike Gran:
> > Hi,
>
> > Would a rewrite of the Guile tests using SRFI-64 be a welcome idea?
> > IMO the advantages of doing so are:
>
> ...
>
> > Opinions?
>
> IMHO, I think Guile should not depend too heavily on Guile for testing itself.
> It is bad bootstrapping practice.

Whether you use Guile's custom test utilities or SRFI-64, in both cases 
you are equally depending on Guile to test itself.

A benefit of SRFI-64 is that the SRFI-64 implementation has tests 
whereas (IIRC) Guile's custom thing doesn't.

Another benefit is that the SRFI-64 implementation is also tested in 
other Scheme implementations, which partially mitigates the ‘tester 
testing itself’ issue (it turns out that it has bugs, see patch by 
Taylan Kammer (*)).

Also, there are not bootstrapping issues, because Guile is built before 
the tests are run (‘make check’ implies ‘make’).

> And personally, I find that errors in srfi-64 tests are more difficult to 
> interpret
> that errors in the guile test suite framework. The logging is worse.

There is a not-yet-applied patch (*) that changes the SRFI 
implementation to be better, but I don't know if it improves error 
messages and logging.

If there is anything concrete you consider worse about error reporting 
in SRFI-64, perhaps the test runner could simply be tweaked to fix that.

(*) https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2021-05/msg00007.html

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