gomock - early attempt at a mocking library

[John Beisley]

Hi,

I've been waiting for a mocking library for Go unit tests to be
written, but as yet I've not seen any turn up in any searches, so I
gave up waiting and wrote a quick attempt at one. This library is not
in a feature-complete state, but I would like to put it out early
before I invest too much time into it in order to get some opinions
and suggestions on how I could better the approach taken in this
library.

It is available via:

https://github.com/huin/gomock

goinstall github.com/huin/gomock

Or in Go code with: import "github.com/huin/gomock"

The objective is to testing calls made upon objects that fulfill a
given interface. This requires code generation for a mock type per
interface type that needs to be mocked. Currently this must be written
by hand, but hopefully a code-generator can be written at some stage.

Features that are obviously missing in this library at present:

* A complete Eq() comparator that can manage more than a few types.
* A more complete set of comparators.
* Any kind of optimization (if that's even desirable).
* Integration with test suites other than the "testing" package in the
Go standard library.

Possible features might include setting constraints upon expected call
order.

Thoughts/opinions?

Thanks,

- John

[David Symonds]

Interesting. I've also written a mocking framework called GoMock. It's
got a very similar approach to yours (interface-based). It's got a
code generator too, which handles a bunch of interesting non-trivial
edge cases.

I should tidy it up and release it.

Dave.

[John Beisley]

On Mar 13, 7:55 pm, David Symonds <dsymo...@golang.org> wrote:
> Interesting. I've also written a mocking framework called GoMock. It's
> got a very similar approach to yours (interface-based). It's got a
> code generator too, which handles a bunch of interesting non-trivial
> edge cases.

Heh, I was slightly worried that the work might already exist. Keep me
posted, as it will likely either be beneficial for either:

* the codebases to merge to bring the best features of both together
(that is assuming your code doesn't already have a superset of
beneficial features),
* my code to change name to avoid confusion.

- John

[David Symonds]

I'm going to aim to push something out this week.
Bug me directly if it gets to the end of the week and I haven't posted
a follow-up.

Dave.

[David Symonds]

Okay, I've released GoMock as open source here:
http://code.google.com/p/gomock/

It builds and runs, but isn't particularly easy to use right now.
I'll work on polishing the sample code and providing some useful
documentation over the next week or two.

Dave.