Actually, it's the reverse of what you said: like OCaml, GHC essentially has ~no unit tests; it's entirely Haskell programs which we compile (and sometimes run; a lot of tests are for the typechecker only so we don't bother running those.) The .T file is just a way of letting the Python driver know what tests exist. Edward Excerpts from Sébastien Hinderer's message of 2017-10-30 16:17:38 +0100:
Dear all,
I am a member of OCaml's developement team. More specifically, I am working on a test-driver for the OCaml compiler, which will be part of OCaml's 4.06 release.
I am currently writing an article to describe the tool and its principles. In this article, I would like to also talk about how other compilers' testsuites are handled and loking how things are done in GHC is natural.
In OCaml, our testsuite essentially consist in whole programs that we compile and run, checking that the compilation and execution results match the expected ones.
From what I could see from GHC's testsuite, it seemed to me that it uses Python to drive the tests. I also understood that the testsuite has tests that are more kind of unit-tests, in the .T file. Am I correct here? Or do you guys also have whole program tests? If you do, how do you compile and run them?
Any comment / hint on this aspect of the test harness' design would be really helpful.
Many thanks in advance,
Sébastien.