Design Rationale

With dozens of well-established unit testing frameworks out there, the question why yet another one? is unavoidable.

The answer is fairly simple—the goal has been to try to further polish the user experience from existing frameworks while maintaining compatibility with both C89 and C++.

Also, it sounded like a great exercise! 😊

It is important to note that nothing is truly novel in Rexo—the main concepts are inspired by existing frameworks like Criterion, novaprova, and others, although their form and implementation have been entirely revised.

Automatic Registration

These two frameworks in particular proved that it was possible to make automatic registration of tests also possible in C, where most C frameworks require a lot of boilerplate to register these.

The advantages that Rexo has in this regard are that:

• it only relies on a widespread compiler-specific feature to get the automatic registration going.
• it works on both Unix and Windows platforms.
• it is implemented in a fairly simple fashion.

Automatic features are always nice to have unless they cannot be overridden. Rexo is designed in such a way that it is possible for the users to skip either parts or the whole automatic registration framework by allowing explicit registration of tests, like more conventional C frameworks offer.

See the automatic registration design page for more details.

Options Definition

Criterion also cleverly demonstrated that it was possible to abuse the languages to make a named argument syntax available for configuring objects.

Rexo took this a step further by allowing test cases not only to inherit options from their parent test suites, but also to tweak only specific fields for each test case.

Since consistency is king in design, the approach was also extended to work with fixtures, thus providing a unified interface to configure all the things.

See the options definition design page for more details.