QuickCheck is a way to do property based testing using randomly generated input. This crate comes with the ability to randomly generate and shrink integers, floats, tuples, booleans, lists, strings, options and results. All QuickCheck needs is a property function—it will then randomly generate inputs to that function and call the property for each set of inputs. If the property fails (whether by a runtime error like index out-of-bounds or by not satisfying your property), the inputs are "shrunk" to find a smaller counter-example.
The shrinking strategies for lists and numbers use a binary search to cover the input space quickly. (It should be the same strategy used in Koen Claessen's QuickCheck for Haskell.)
Dual-licensed under MIT or the UNLICENSE.
The API is fully documented: http://burntsushi.net/rustdoc/quickcheck/.
Here's an example that tests a function that reverses a vector:
#[cfg(test)]
#[macro_use]
extern crate quickcheck;
fn reverse<T: Clone>(xs: &[T]) -> Vec<T> {
let mut rev = vec!();
for x in xs.iter() {
rev.insert(0, x.clone())
}
rev
}
#[cfg(test)]
mod tests {
quickcheck! {
fn prop(xs: Vec<u32>) -> bool {
xs == reverse(&reverse(&xs))
}
}
}
This example uses the quickcheck!
macro, which is available on stable Rust.
To make it easier to write QuickCheck tests, the #[quickcheck]
attribute
will convert a property function into a #[test]
function.
To use the #[quickcheck]
attribute, you must enable the plugin
feature and
import the quickcheck_macros
crate as a syntax extension:
#![feature(plugin)]
#![plugin(quickcheck_macros)]
#[cfg(test)]
extern crate quickcheck;
#[cfg(test)]
mod tests {
fn reverse<T: Clone>(xs: &[T]) -> Vec<T> {
let mut rev = vec!();
for x in xs {
rev.insert(0, x.clone())
}
rev
}
#[quickcheck]
fn double_reversal_is_identity(xs: Vec<isize>) -> bool {
xs == reverse(&reverse(&xs))
}
}
quickcheck
is on crates.io
, so you can include it in your project like so:
[dependencies]
quickcheck = "0.3"
If you're only using quickcheck
in your test code, then you can add it as a
development dependency instead:
[dev-dependencies]
quickcheck = "0.3"
If you want to use the #[quickcheck]
attribute, then add quickcheck_macros
[dev-dependencies]
quickcheck = "0.3"
quickcheck_macros = "0.2"
and only enable the quickcheck_macros
plugin for the test build
#![cfg_attr(test, feature(plugin))]
#![cfg_attr(test, plugin(quickcheck_macros))]
Note that the #[quickcheck]
macro will not work when Rust 1.0 stable is
released, although it will continue to work on the nightlies.
N.B. When using quickcheck
(either directly or via the attributes),
RUST_LOG=quickcheck
enables info!
so that it shows useful output
(like the number of tests passed). This is not needed to show
witnesses for failures.
Sometimes you want to test a property that only holds for a subset of the possible inputs, so that when your property is given an input that is outside of that subset, you'd discard it. In particular, the property should neither pass nor fail on inputs outside of the subset you want to test. But properties return boolean values—which either indicate pass or fail.
To fix this, we need to take a step back and look at the type of the
quickcheck
function:
pub fn quickcheck<A: Testable>(f: A) {
// elided
}
So quickcheck
can test any value with a type that satisfies the Testable
trait. Great, so what is this Testable
business?
pub trait Testable {
fn result<G: Gen>(&self, &mut G) -> TestResult;
}
This trait states that a type is testable if it can produce a TestResult
given a source of randomness. (A TestResult
stores information about the
results of a test, like whether it passed, failed or has been discarded.)
Sure enough, bool
satisfies the Testable
trait:
impl Testable for bool {
fn result<G: Gen>(&self, _: &mut G) -> TestResult {
TestResult::from_bool(*self)
}
}
But in the example, we gave a function to quickcheck
. Yes, functions can
satisfy Testable
too!
impl<A: Arbitrary + Debug, B: Testable> Testable for fn(A) -> B {
fn result<G: Gen>(&self, g: &mut G) -> TestResult {
// elided
}
}
Which says that a function satisfies Testable
if and only if it has a single
parameter type (whose values can be randomly generated and shrunk) and returns
any type (that also satisfies Testable
). So a function with type fn(usize) -> bool
satisfies Testable
since usize
satisfies Arbitrary
and bool
satisfies Testable
.
So to discard a test, we need to return something other than bool
. What if we
just returned a TestResult
directly? That should work, but we'll need to
make sure TestResult
satisfies Testable
:
impl Testable for TestResult {
fn result<G: Gen>(&self, _: &mut G) -> TestResult { self.clone() }
}
Now we can test functions that return a TestResult
directly.
As an example, let's test our reverse function to make sure that the reverse of a vector of length 1 is equal to the vector itself.
fn prop(xs: Vec<isize>) -> TestResult {
if xs.len() != 1 {
return TestResult::discard()
}
TestResult::from_bool(xs == reverse(&xs))
}
quickcheck(prop as fn(Vec<isize>) -> TestResult);
(A full working program for this example is in
examples/reverse_single.rs
.)
So now our property returns a TestResult
, which allows us to encode a bit
more information. There are a few more
convenience functions defined for the TestResult
type.
For example, we can't just return a bool
, so we convert a bool
value to a
TestResult
.
(The ability to discard tests allows you to get similar functionality as
Haskell's ==>
combinator.)
N.B. Since discarding a test means it neither passes nor fails, quickcheck
will try to replace the discarded test with a fresh one. However, if your
condition is seldom met, it's possible that quickcheck
will have to settle
for running fewer tests than usual. By default, if quickcheck
can't find
100
valid tests after trying 10,000
times, then it will give up.
This parameter may be changed using
quickcheck_config
.
Shrinking is a crucial part of QuickCheck that simplifies counter-examples for your properties automatically. For example, if you erroneously defined a function for reversing vectors as: (my apologies for the contrived example)
fn reverse<T: Clone>(xs: &[T]) -> Vec<T> {
let mut rev = vec![];
for i in 1..xs.len() {
rev.insert(0, xs[i].clone())
}
rev
}
And a property to test that xs == reverse(reverse(xs))
:
fn prop(xs: Vec<isize>) -> bool {
xs == reverse(&reverse(&xs))
}
quickcheck(prop as fn(Vec<isize>) -> bool);
Then without shrinking, you might get a counter-example like:
[quickcheck] TEST FAILED. Arguments: ([-17, 13, -12, 17, -8, -10, 15, -19,
-19, -9, 11, -5, 1, 19, -16, 6])
Which is pretty mysterious. But with shrinking enabled, you're nearly guaranteed to get this counter-example every time:
[quickcheck] TEST FAILED. Arguments: ([0])
Which is going to be much easier to debug.
The Sieve of Eratosthenes
is a simple and elegant way to find all primes less than or equal to N
.
Briefly, the algorithm works by allocating an array with N
slots containing
booleans. Slots marked with false
correspond to prime numbers (or numbers
not known to be prime while building the sieve) and slots marked with true
are known to not be prime. For each n
, all of its multiples in this array
are marked as true. When all n
have been checked, the numbers marked false
are returned as the primes.
As you might imagine, there's a lot of potential for off-by-one errors, which makes it ideal for randomized testing. So let's take a look at my implementation and see if we can spot the bug:
fn sieve(n: usize) -> Vec<usize> {
if n <= 1 {
return vec![];
}
let mut marked = vec![false; n+1];
marked[0] = true;
marked[1] = true;
marked[2] = true;
for p in 2..n {
for i in (2*p..n).filter(|&n| n % p == 0) {
marked[i] = true;
}
}
marked.iter()
.enumerate()
.filter_map(|(i, &m)| if m { None } else { Some(i) })
.collect()
}
Let's try it on a few inputs by hand:
sieve(3) => [2, 3]
sieve(5) => [2, 3, 5]
sieve(8) => [2, 3, 5, 7, 8] # !!!
Something has gone wrong! But where? The bug is rather subtle, but it's an easy one to make. It's OK if you can't spot it, because we're going to use QuickCheck to help us track it down.
Even before looking at some example outputs, it's good to try and come up with
some properties that are always satisfiable by the output of the function. An
obvious one for the prime number sieve is to check if all numbers returned are
prime. For that, we'll need an is_prime
function:
fn is_prime(n: usize) -> bool {
n != 0 && n != 1 && (2..).take_while(|i| i*i <= n).all(|i| n % i != 0)
}
All this is doing is checking to see if any number in [2, sqrt(n)]
divides
n
with base cases for 0
and 1
.
Now we can write our QuickCheck property:
fn prop_all_prime(n: usize) -> bool {
sieve(n).into_iter().all(is_prime)
}
And finally, we need to invoke quickcheck
with our property:
fn main() {
quickcheck(prop_all_prime as fn(usize) -> bool);
}
A fully working source file with this code is in
examples/sieve.rs
.
The output of running this program has this message:
[quickcheck] TEST FAILED. Arguments: (4)
Which says that sieve
failed the prop_all_prime
test when given n = 4
.
Because of shrinking, it was able to find a (hopefully) minimal counter-example
for our property.
With such a short counter-example, it's hopefully a bit easier to narrow down
where the bug is. Since 4
is returned, it's likely never marked as being not
prime. Since 4
is a multiple of 2
, its slot should be marked as true
when
p = 2
on these lines:
for i in (2*p..n).filter(|&n| n % p == 0) {
marked[i] = true;
}
Ah! But does the ..
(range) operator include n
? Nope! This particular
operator is a half-open interval.
A 2*p..n
range will never yield 4
when n = 4
. When we change this to
2*p..n+1
, all tests pass.
In addition, if our bug happened to result in an index out-of-bounds error,
then quickcheck
can handle it just like any other failure—including
shrinking on failures caused by runtime errors.
But hold on... we're not done yet. Right now, our property tests that all
the numbers returned by sieve
are prime but it doesn't test if the list is
complete. It does not ensure that all the primes between 0
and n
are found.
Here's a property that is more comprehensive:
fn prop_prime_iff_in_the_sieve(n: usize) -> bool {
sieve(n) == (0..(n + 1)).filter(|&i| is_prime(i)).collect::<Vec<_>>()
}
It tests that for each number between 0 and n, inclusive, the naive primality test yields the same result as the sieve.
Now, if we run it:
fn main() {
quickcheck(prop_all_prime as fn(usize) -> bool);
quickcheck(prop_prime_iff_in_the_sieve as fn(usize) -> bool);
}
we see that it fails immediately for value n = 2.
[quickcheck] TEST FAILED. Arguments: (2)
If we inspect sieve()
once again, we see that we mistakenly mark 2
as
non-prime. Removing the line marked[2] = true;
results in both properties
passing.
I think I've captured the key features, but there are still things missing:
- As of now, only functions with 4 or fewer parameters can be quickchecked.
This limitation can be lifted to some
N
, but requires an implementation for eachn
of theTestable
trait. - Functions that fail because of a stack overflow are not caught by QuickCheck. Therefore, such failures will not have a witness attached to them. (I'd like to fix this, but I don't know how.)
Coarbitrary
does not exist in any form in this package. I think it's possible; I just haven't gotten around to it yet.