Testing

Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but it is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.

Edsger W. Dijkstra, "The Humble Programmer" (1972)

Let's talk about how to test Rust code. What we will not be talking about is the right way to test Rust code. There are many schools of thought regarding the right and wrong way to write tests. All of these approaches use the same basic tools, and so we'll show you the syntax for using them.

The test attribute

At its simplest, a test in Rust is a function that's annotated with the test attribute. Let's make a new project with Cargo called adder:

$ cargo new adder
$ cd adder

Cargo will automatically generate a simple test when you make a new project. Here's the contents of src/lib.rs:

#[test]
fn it_works() {
}

Note the #[test]. This attribute indicates that this is a test function. It currently has no body. That's good enough to pass! We can run the tests with cargo test:

$ cargo test
   Compiling adder v0.0.1 (file:///home/you/projects/adder)
     Running target/adder-91b3e234d4ed382a

running 1 test
test it_works ... ok

test result: ok. 1 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

   Doc-tests adder

running 0 tests

test result: ok. 0 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

Cargo compiled and ran our tests. There are two sets of output here: one for the test we wrote, and another for documentation tests. We'll talk about those later. For now, see this line:

test it_works ... ok

Note the it_works. This comes from the name of our function:

fn it_works() {

We also get a summary line:

test result: ok. 1 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

So why does our do-nothing test pass? Any test which doesn't panic! passes, and any test that does panic! fails. Let's make our test fail:

#[test]
fn it_works() {
    assert!(false);
}

assert! is a macro provided by Rust which takes one argument: if the argument is true, nothing happens. If the argument is false, it panic!s. Let's run our tests again:

$ cargo test
   Compiling adder v0.0.1 (file:///home/you/projects/adder)
     Running target/adder-91b3e234d4ed382a

running 1 test
test it_works ... FAILED

failures:

---- it_works stdout ----
        thread 'it_works' panicked at 'assertion failed: false', /home/steve/tmp/adder/src/lib.rs:3



failures:
    it_works

test result: FAILED. 0 passed; 1 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

thread '<main>' panicked at 'Some tests failed', /home/steve/src/rust/src/libtest/lib.rs:247

Rust indicates that our test failed:

test it_works ... FAILED

And that's reflected in the summary line:

test result: FAILED. 0 passed; 1 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

We also get a non-zero status code:

$ echo $?
101

This is useful if you want to integrate cargo test into other tooling.

We can invert our test's failure with another attribute: should_fail:

#[test]
#[should_fail]
fn it_works() {
    assert!(false);
}

This test will now succeed if we panic! and fail if we complete. Let's try it:

$ cargo test
   Compiling adder v0.0.1 (file:///home/you/projects/adder)
     Running target/adder-91b3e234d4ed382a

running 1 test
test it_works ... ok

test result: ok. 1 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

   Doc-tests adder

running 0 tests

test result: ok. 0 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

Rust provides another macro, assert_eq!, that compares two arguments for equality:

#[test]
#[should_fail]
fn it_works() {
    assert_eq!("Hello", "world");
}

Does this test pass or fail? Because of the should_fail attribute, it passes:

$ cargo test
   Compiling adder v0.0.1 (file:///home/you/projects/adder)
     Running target/adder-91b3e234d4ed382a

running 1 test
test it_works ... ok

test result: ok. 1 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

   Doc-tests adder

running 0 tests

test result: ok. 0 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

should_fail tests can be fragile, as it's hard to guarantee that the test didn't fail for an unexpected reason. To help with this, an optional expected parameter can be added to the should_fail attribute. The test harness will make sure that the failure message contains the provided text. A safer version of the example above would be:

#[test]
#[should_fail(expected = "assertion failed")]
fn it_works() {
    assert_eq!("Hello", "world");
}

That's all there is to the basics! Let's write one 'real' test:

pub fn add_two(a: i32) -> i32 {
    a + 2
}

#[test]
fn it_works() {
    assert_eq!(4, add_two(2));
}

This is a very common use of assert_eq!: call some function with some known arguments and compare it to the expected output.

The test module

There is one way in which our existing example is not idiomatic: it's missing the test module. The idiomatic way of writing our example looks like this:

pub fn add_two(a: i32) -> i32 {
    a + 2
}

#[cfg(test)]
mod tests {
    use super::add_two;

    #[test]
    fn it_works() {
        assert_eq!(4, add_two(2));
    }
}

There's a few changes here. The first is the introduction of a mod tests with a cfg attribute. The module allows us to group all of our tests together, and to also define helper functions if needed, that don't become a part of the rest of our crate. The cfg attribute only compiles our test code if we're currently trying to run the tests. This can save compile time, and also ensures that our tests are entirely left out of a normal build.

The second change is the use declaration. Because we're in an inner module, we need to bring our test function into scope. This can be annoying if you have a large module, and so this is a common use of the glob feature. Let's change our src/lib.rs to make use of it:

pub fn add_two(a: i32) -> i32 {
    a + 2
}

#[cfg(test)]
mod tests {
    use super::*;

    #[test]
    fn it_works() {
        assert_eq!(4, add_two(2));
    }
}

Note the different use line. Now we run our tests:

$ cargo test
    Updating registry `https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index`
   Compiling adder v0.0.1 (file:///home/you/projects/adder)
     Running target/adder-91b3e234d4ed382a

running 1 test
test test::it_works ... ok

test result: ok. 1 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

   Doc-tests adder

running 0 tests

test result: ok. 0 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

It works!

The current convention is to use the test module to hold your "unit-style" tests. Anything that just tests one small bit of functionality makes sense to go here. But what about "integration-style" tests instead? For that, we have the tests directory

The tests directory

To write an integration test, let's make a tests directory, and put a tests/lib.rs file inside, with this as its contents:

extern crate adder;

#[test]
fn it_works() {
    assert_eq!(4, adder::add_two(2));
}   

This looks similar to our previous tests, but slightly different. We now have an extern crate adder at the top. This is because the tests in the tests directory are an entirely separate crate, and so we need to import our library. This is also why tests is a suitable place to write integration-style tests: they use the library like any other consumer of it would.

Let's run them:

$ cargo test
   Compiling adder v0.0.1 (file:///home/you/projects/adder)
     Running target/adder-91b3e234d4ed382a

running 1 test
test test::it_works ... ok

test result: ok. 1 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

     Running target/lib-c18e7d3494509e74

running 1 test
test it_works ... ok

test result: ok. 1 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

   Doc-tests adder

running 0 tests

test result: ok. 0 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

Now we have three sections: our previous test is also run, as well as our new one.

That's all there is to the tests directory. The test module isn't needed here, since the whole thing is focused on tests.

Let's finally check out that third section: documentation tests.

Documentation tests

Nothing is better than documentation with examples. Nothing is worse than examples that don't actually work, because the code has changed since the documentation has been written. To this end, Rust supports automatically running examples in your documentation. Here's a fleshed-out src/lib.rs with examples:

//! The `adder` crate provides functions that add numbers to other numbers.
//!
//! # Examples
//!
//! ```
//! assert_eq!(4, adder::add_two(2));
//! ```

/// This function adds two to its argument.
///
/// # Examples
///
/// ```
/// use adder::add_two;
///
/// assert_eq!(4, add_two(2));
/// ```
pub fn add_two(a: i32) -> i32 {
    a + 2
}

#[cfg(test)]
mod tests {
    use super::*;

    #[test]
    fn it_works() {
        assert_eq!(4, add_two(2));
    }
}

Note the module-level documentation with //! and the function-level documentation with ///. Rust's documentation supports Markdown in comments, and so triple graves mark code blocks. It is conventional to include the # Examples section, exactly like that, with examples following.

Let's run the tests again:

$ cargo test
   Compiling adder v0.0.1 (file:///home/steve/tmp/adder)
     Running target/adder-91b3e234d4ed382a

running 1 test
test test::it_works ... ok

test result: ok. 1 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

     Running target/lib-c18e7d3494509e74

running 1 test
test it_works ... ok

test result: ok. 1 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

   Doc-tests adder

running 2 tests
test add_two_0 ... ok
test _0 ... ok

test result: ok. 2 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured

Now we have all three kinds of tests running! Note the names of the documentation tests: the _0 is generated for the module test, and add_two_0 for the function test. These will auto increment with names like add_two_1 as you add more examples.

Benchmark tests

Rust also supports benchmark tests, which can test the performance of your code. Let's make our src/lib.rs look like this (comments elided):

extern crate test;

pub fn add_two(a: i32) -> i32 {
    a + 2
}

#[cfg(test)]
mod tests {
    use super::*;
    use test::Bencher;

    #[test]
    fn it_works() {
        assert_eq!(4, add_two(2));
    }

    #[bench]
    fn bench_add_two(b: &mut Bencher) {
        b.iter(|| add_two(2));
    }
}

We've imported the test crate, which contains our benchmarking support. We have a new function as well, with the bench attribute. Unlike regular tests, which take no arguments, benchmark tests take a &mut Bencher. This Bencher provides an iter method, which takes a closure. This closure contains the code we'd like to benchmark.

We can run benchmark tests with cargo bench:

$ cargo bench
   Compiling adder v0.0.1 (file:///home/steve/tmp/adder)
     Running target/release/adder-91b3e234d4ed382a

running 2 tests
test tests::it_works ... ignored
test tests::bench_add_two ... bench:         1 ns/iter (+/- 0)

test result: ok. 0 passed; 0 failed; 1 ignored; 1 measured

Our non-benchmark test was ignored. You may have noticed that cargo bench takes a bit longer than cargo test. This is because Rust runs our benchmark a number of times, and then takes the average. Because we're doing so little work in this example, we have a 1 ns/iter (+/- 0), but this would show the variance if there was one.

Advice on writing benchmarks:

• Move setup code outside the iter loop; only put the part you want to measure inside
• Make the code do "the same thing" on each iteration; do not accumulate or change state
• Make the outer function idempotent too; the benchmark runner is likely to run it many times
• Make the inner iter loop short and fast so benchmark runs are fast and the calibrator can adjust the run-length at fine resolution
• Make the code in the iter loop do something simple, to assist in pinpointing performance improvements (or regressions)

Gotcha: optimizations

There's another tricky part to writing benchmarks: benchmarks compiled with optimizations activated can be dramatically changed by the optimizer so that the benchmark is no longer benchmarking what one expects. For example, the compiler might recognize that some calculation has no external effects and remove it entirely.

extern crate test;
use test::Bencher;

#[bench]
fn bench_xor_1000_ints(b: &mut Bencher) {
    b.iter(|| {
        (0..1000).fold(0, |old, new| old ^ new);
    });
}

gives the following results

running 1 test
test bench_xor_1000_ints ... bench:         0 ns/iter (+/- 0)

test result: ok. 0 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 1 measured

The benchmarking runner offers two ways to avoid this. Either, the closure that the iter method receives can return an arbitrary value which forces the optimizer to consider the result used and ensures it cannot remove the computation entirely. This could be done for the example above by adjusting the b.iter call to

b.iter(|| {
    // note lack of `;` (could also use an explicit `return`).
    (0..1000).fold(0, |old, new| old ^ new)
});

Or, the other option is to call the generic test::black_box function, which is an opaque "black box" to the optimizer and so forces it to consider any argument as used.

extern crate test;

b.iter(|| {
    let n = test::black_box(1000);

    (0..n).fold(0, |a, b| a ^ b)
})

Neither of these read or modify the value, and are very cheap for small values. Larger values can be passed indirectly to reduce overhead (e.g. black_box(&huge_struct)).

Performing either of the above changes gives the following benchmarking results

running 1 test
test bench_xor_1000_ints ... bench:       131 ns/iter (+/- 3)

test result: ok. 0 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 1 measured

However, the optimizer can still modify a testcase in an undesirable manner even when using either of the above.