Sunday 28 August 2016

Busted or LuaUnit?

Having decided to learn Lua and testing Lua at the same time, I need to decide on a testing framework. There seem to be quite a large number available. I was guided to look at Busted and LuaUnit. Both seem active, professional and have good documentation. They have quite different approaches and it is hard to chose between them without any experience of them. 

I have decided to use them both whilst learning Lua. That decision will, no doubt, slow my learning a little but it should give a greater depth to what I learn.

To get started quickly, a took a function from a Prag Prog Magazine  article "a-functional-introduction-to-lua" and created a module to put it in and wrote both Busted and LuaUnit tests for it.

Here is the module and function:

    local learnLua = {}

    function learnLua.namesOf (things)
      local names = {}
        for index, thing in pairs(things) do
    names[index] = thing.name
  end
      return names
    end

    return learnLua

Here's the Busted test:

    require 'busted.runner'()
    local ll = require 'learnLua'

    describe("Flames with Lua", function()
      describe("namesOf", function()
        it("extract string names", function()
          local cats = {
            { name = "meg", breed = "persian" },
      { name = "mog", breed = "siamese" }
          }
          assert.equal("meg", ll.namesOf(cats)[1])
          assert.equal("mog", ll.namesOf(cats)[2])
          assert.equal(2, # ll.namesOf(cats))
        end)
      end)
    end)

Here's the LuaUnit test:

    luaunit = require 'luaunit'
    ll = require 'learnLua'

    local cats = {
      { name = "meg", breed = "persian" },
      { name = "mog", breed = "siamese" }
    }

    function testNameExtract() 
      local cats = {
        { name = "meg", breed = "persian" },
  { name = "mog", breed = "siamese" }
      }
      local names = ll.namesOf(cats)
      luaunit.assertEquals(names[1], "meg")
      luaunit.assertEquals(names[2], "mog")
      luaunit.assertEquals(# names, 2)
   end

  os.exit( luaunit.LuaUnit.run() )

Both tests pass:
    $ luajit learn-unit.lua            
    . 
    Ran 1 tests in 0.000 seconds, 1 success, 0 failures    OK

    $ luajit learn-busted.lua    
    1 success / 0 failures / 0 errors / 0 pending : 0.000617 seconds

Not a lot to chose between them when testing such a simple function. I need to work up to something more complex to really see the differences between them.

I'd be happy to learn about improvements in style or form that I could make in writing Lua, Busted tests and LuaUnit tests.

There is some early feedback on Busted and LuaUnit in Test Doubles and you can read my conclusion in Busted or LuaUnit? Answered

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can you run busted using maven build?

Peter W A Wood, Programmer said...

Busted can be run from the command line - http://olivinelabs.com/busted/#usage - so I don't see why not. (I don't use maven myself.)