Roadmap

This library is free, and will stay free but needs your support to sustain its development. There are lots of new features and maintenance to do. If you work for a company using doctest or have the means to do so, please consider financial support.

Planned features for future releases - order may change.

For 1.2:

• adding contextual info to asserts (logging) - with an INFO/CONTEXT/CAPTURE/TRACEPOINT macro (also look at this)
• add ERROR/FAIL macros (also ADD_FAILURE_AT(file, line); and extend the asserts to have _AT variants)
• Parametric test cases (Value/Type-parameterized tests) - https://github.com/onqtam/doctest/issues/38
• crash handling: signals on UNIX platforms or structured exceptions on Windows (should also have DOCTEST_CONFIG_NO_SIGNAL_CATCHING)
• runtime performance
  • the set holding all registered tests should use a specialized allocator to minimize program startup time
  • lazily stringify expressions - only when needed
  • pool allocator for the String class - currently very unoptimized
  • get rid of local statics on the hot path - like in getContextState()
• benchmarking
  • make the bench.py script more usable - with command line arguments
  • redo the compile time ones - also look into CATCH_CONFIG_FAST_COMPILE
  • remove old benchmarks for doctest 1.0
  • add runtime benchmarks
• change docs a bit - mainly what is in the landing page (add link to overload)
• address the coverage issue...

For 1.3:

• builds with GCC 7 when it is released (should be in late April) - also by then the precise (ubuntu 12.04) ppa for clang 4.0 should be whitelisted by travis
• reporters
  • output to file
  • a system for writing custom reporters
  • ability to use multiple reporters at once (but only 1 to stdout)
  • a compact reporter
  • a progress reporter
  • an xml reporter
  • jUnit/xUnit reporters
  • a listener interface - similar to a reporter - look at Catch
• ability to have no output when everything succeeds
• time stuff
  • reporting running time of tests
  • count a test case as failed if it exceeds X ms (but no force-killing!)
  • killing a test that exceeds a time limit (will perhaps require threading or processes)
• matchers - should investigate what they are - look at google test and Catch
• convolution support for the assertion macros (with a predicate)
• generators? - look at Catch - and investigate what they are (also in boost)
• mocking - investigate google mock assertion macros and interop with doctest (also mockitopp and trompeloeil) - and write in FAQ - lest integrates with trompeloeil like this
• look at property based testing (for example rapidcheck) - and write in FAQ

For 1.4:

• running tests a few times
• test execution in separate processes - fork() for UNIX and this for Windows
• symbolizer - for a stack trace - when an assertion fails - and it's in a user function with some deep callstack away from the current test case - how to know the exact code path that lead to the failing assert
• ability to make the framework not capture unexpected exceptions - as requested here
• add Approx ability to compare with absolute epsilon - Catch PR
• ability to customize the colors in the console output (may also use styles - based on this)
• implement breaking into the debugger under linux - see here and here

Things that are being considered but not part of the roadmap yet:

• when no assertion is encountered in a test case it should fail
• failure reporting should print out previous SECTIONs for data-driven testing - as requested here
• Bitwise() class that has overloaded operators for comparison - to be used to check objects bitwise against each other
• detect floating point exceptions
• option to output summary only
• support for tags
  • may fail tag
  • invisible tag
  • look at Catch - https://github.com/philsquared/Catch/blob/master/docs/test-cases-and-sections.md#special-tags
• marking a test to run X times (should also multiply with the global test run times)
• integrate static analysis on the CI: msvc, clang, cppcheck
• extend Approx for types that have operator double - see here and here
• option to list files in which there are test cases who match the current filters
• support for doing assertions in multiple threads - synchronize their access to shared doctest state
• support for running tests in parallel in multiple threads
• doctest in a GUI environment? with no console? APIs for attaching a console? querying if there is one? investigate...
• ability to specify ASC/DESC for the order option
• command line error handling/reporting
• ability for the user to extend the command line - as requested here
• look into MSTest integration
  • http://accu.org/index.php/journals/1851
  • https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh270865.aspx
  • https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh598953.aspx
  • also look into similar Xcode integration - https://github.com/philsquared/Catch/pull/454
• ability to provide a temp folder that is cleared between each test case
• rework the examples folder - so the test runner is compiled only a few times - CI builds take a ton of time!

Things that are very unlikely to enter the roadmap:

• test with missed warning flags for GCC - look into https://github.com/Barro/compiler-warnings
• utf8???
• handle wchar strings???
• hierarchical test suites - using a stack for the pushed ones
• add a "wait key" option - as requested here
• ability to specify the width of the terminal in terms of characters (for example 60 - less than 80 - the default)
• ability to re-run only newly compiled tests based on time stamps using __DATE__ and __TIME__ - stored in some file
• add underscores to all preprocessor identifiers not intended for use by the user
• put everything from the detail namespace also in a nested anonymous namespace to make them with internal linkage
• ability to put everything from doctest into an anonymous namespace - to allow the use of multiple different versions of doctest within the same binary (executable/dll) - like the stb libraries can

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