Comparison of C++ unit test frameworks

c++ unit-testing cppunit googletest boost-test
housemaister picture housemaister · Oct 28, 2008 · Viewed 277.7k times · Source

I know there are already a few questions regarding recommendations for C++ unit test frameworks, but all the answers did not help as they just recommend one of the frameworks but do not provide any information about a (feature) comparison.

I think the most interesting frameworks are CppUnit, Boost and the new Google testing framework. Has anybody done any comparison yet?

Answer

Wernight picture Wernight · Aug 25, 2010

A new player is Google Test (also known as Google C++ Testing Framework) which is pretty nice though.

#include <gtest/gtest.h>

TEST(MyTestSuitName, MyTestCaseName) {
    int actual = 1;
    EXPECT_GT(actual, 0);
    EXPECT_EQ(1, actual) << "Should be equal to one";
}

Main features:

  • Portable
  • Fatal and non-fatal assertions
  • Easy assertions informative messages: ASSERT_EQ(5, Foo(i)) << " where i = " << i;
  • Google Test automatically detects your tests and doesn't require you to enumerate them in order to run them
  • Make it easy to extend your assertion vocabulary
  • Death tests (see advanced guide)
  • SCOPED_TRACE for subroutine loops
  • You can decide which tests to run
  • XML test report generation
  • Fixtures / Mock / Templates...

Related questions

GoogleTest vs CppUnit: The facts

In the process of setting our C++ unit testing framework for the next years we shortlisted GoogleTest and CppUnit. I have some experience with both and my heavy preference is GoogleTest. Anyways to convince my boss I need some facts …

Read More
C++ Unit Testing Libraries

I've come across cppunit but it didn't look super-easy to use (maybe I didn't look hard, maybe because C++ doesn't work like Java/C#). Are there widely used, simple alternatives? In fact, is cppunit the standard unit testing framework for …

Read More
Unit testing destructors?

Is there any good way to unit test destructors? Like say I have a class like this (contrived) example: class X { private: int *x; public: X() { x = new int; } ~X() { delete x; } int *getX() {return x;} const int *getX() const {…

Read More