Unit Testing C Code Using Golang's Unit Testing Framework

[Shale Craig]

For fun, I've written a small library in C, to be used in an embedded C system.

After poking around with a few C unit-test libraries, I decided to test using go's "cgo"+"testing" packages as a way to learn the language.

Though I'm currently blocked on Issue 4030 to have cgo working, it looks like the testing library prevents users from importing the "C" package.

I understand that the testing package is built for golang unit tests, and it's a good practice to prevent users from using C from the tests that are meant to isolate their code, but this prevents me from being able to directly test my C code.

I've written a short .go file (and unit tests for it), but would prefer not to maintain the extra code.

// sample line from the .go file:

// ...

import "C"

func Call_c_foo() int {

 return C.foo()

}

Is there a better/recommended way of doing this?

[minux]

I'm afraid there isn't better alternatives. Essentially you will have two files,

pkg_test.go for tests, and another normal go file that do the cgo interfacing.

However, if you take a look at $GOROOT/msic/cgo/test, you will see that

the trick is this:

// pkg_test.go

package pkg

import "testing"

func TestSomething(t *testing.T) { testSomething(t) }

// pkg.go

import "C"

import "testing"

func testSomething(t *testing.T) {

   // now you can use both C.xxx and t.

}

If organized this way, all it costs is one extra "wrapper" function for each test.