Features and design goals

doctest has been designed from the start to be as light and unintrusive as possible. These key features should be kept.

Unintrusive (transparent):

  • everything testing-related can be removed from the binary executable by defining the DOCTEST_CONFIG_DISABLE identifier
  • very small and easy to integrate - single header - less than 3k LOC in the implementation translation unit and less than 1.5k LOC everywhere else - extremely low footprint on compile times - see the benchmarks
  • doesn't drag any headers when included (except for in the translation unit where the library gets implemented)
  • everything is in the doctest namespace (and the implementation details are in a nested detail namespace)
  • all macros have prefixes - some by default have unprefixed versions as well but that is optional - see configuration
  • 0 warnings even with the most aggresive flags (on all tested compilers!!!)
    • -Weverything -pedantic for clang
    • -Wall -Wextra -pedantic and >> over 50 << other warnings not covered by these flags for GCC!!! - see here
    • /W4 for MSVC (/Wall is too much there - even their own headers produce thousands of warnings with that option)
  • doesn't error on unrecognized command line options and supports prefixes for interop with client command line parsing
  • can set options procedurally and not deal with passing argc/argv from the command line
  • doesn't leave warnings disabled after itself

Extremely portable:

  • Standards compliant C++98 code - should work with any C++98 compiler
  • tested with GCC: 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 4.9, 5.0
  • tested with Clang: 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8
  • tested with MSVC: 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015 (and even VC++6 - that 18 year old compiler from 1998!)
  • per-commit tested on travis and appveyor CI services
    • warnings as errors even on the most aggressive warning levels - see here
    • all tests have their output compared to reference output of a previous known good run
    • all tests built and ran in Debug/Release and also in 32/64 bit modes
    • all tests ran through valgrind under Linux/OSX
    • all tests ran through address and UB sanitizers under Linux/OSX
    • tests are ran in a total of 180 different configurations on UNIX (Linux + OSX) on travis CI
    • tests are ran in a total of 18 different configurations on Windows on appveyor CI

Other features:

  • really easy to get started - it's just 1 header file - see the tutorial
  • very light, unintrusive and portable - see the sections above - and also the benchmarks
  • offers a way to remove everything testing-related from the binary with the DOCTEST_CONFIG_DISABLE macro
  • tests are registered automatically - no need to add them to a collection manually
  • supports subcases for easy setup/teardown of tests (also supports the retro test fixtures with classes)
  • output from all compilers on all platforms is the same - byte by byte
  • supports BDD style tests
  • only one core assertion macro for comparisons - standard C++ operators are used for the comparison (less than, equal, greater than...) - yet the full expression is decomposed and left and right values of the expression are logged
  • assertion macros for exceptions - if something should or shouldn't throw
  • floating point comparison support - see the Approx() helper
  • powerful mechanism for stringification of user types
  • tests can be grouped in test suites
  • powerful command line with lots of options
  • tests can be filtered based on their name/file/test suite using wildcards
  • failures can (optionally) break into the debugger on Windows and Mac
  • integration with the output window of Visual Studio for failing tests
  • a main() can be provided when implementing the library with the DOCTEST_CONFIG_IMPLEMENT_WITH_MAIN identifier
  • can write tests in headers - they will still be registered only once in the executable/shared object
  • range-based execution of tests - see the range_based_execution example (the run.py script)
  • colored output in the console
  • controlling the order of test execution

There is a list of planned features which are all important and big - see the roadmap.

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