Teal Support¶

tested is built from the ground up with with Teal and makes it a first class citizen. Unit tests can be written in Teal and all the functionality (including code coverage!) works across both languages wonderfully. However, there are a couple of things to keep in mind when using tested with Teal projects.

Build, then test if perf matters¶

If you have a Teal project and are writing your unit tests in Teal, every test file will compile the Teal as it gets loaded.

Example Teal unit test:

local utf8validator = require("utf8validator") -- will compile the `utf8validator` module
local tested = require("tested")

tested.test("should support ascii", function()
   local start_seq = tonumber("00000000", 2)
   local end_seq = tonumber("01111111", 2)

   for i = start_seq, end_seq do
      tested.assert({
        given="string.char " .. i,
        should="support ascii char",
        expected=true,
        actual=utf8validator(string.char(i))
      })
   end

end)

return tested

Assuming I had multiple unit test files that all pull in utf8validator, every one of them will re-compile the utf8validator.tl file, which can slow down the test suite. If this slowdown is of particular concern, you should instead compile your Teal code first and write your test files in Lua. It really depends on how large your Teal project is, how many test files you have, and how you interface with them.

For example, if you are doing TDD, you may want to accept the performance loss and use Teal unit test files so that tested is always using the Teal files as a source. If you have a large test suite where Lua benchmarking matters, it may make more sense to compile and then test.

In the future, I may consider adding in some way to avoid that additional compilation, so any Teal modules only get compiled once, but it sort've goes against the ethos of unit testing should be isolated if require'd modules start being shared across files.