Comparison of C++ unit test frameworks

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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?

9 Answers

I've just pushed my own framework, Catch2, out there. It's still under development but I believe it already surpasses most other frameworks. Different people have different criteria but I've tried to cover most ground without too many trade-offs. Take a look at my linked blog entry for a taster. My top five features are:

  • Header only
  • Auto registration of function and method based tests
  • Decomposes standard C++ expressions into LHS and RHS (so you don't need a whole family of assert macros).
  • Support for nested sections within a function based fixture
  • Name tests using natural language - function/method names are generated

It also has Objective-C bindings. The project is hosted on Github

API Sanity Checker — test framework for C/C++ libraries:

An automatic generator of basic unit tests for a shared C/C++ library. It is able to generate reasonable (in most, but unfortunately not all, cases) input data for parameters and compose simple ("sanity" or "shallow"-quality) test cases for every function in the API through the analysis of declarations in header files.

The quality of generated tests allows to check absence of critical errors in simple use cases. The tool is able to build and execute generated tests and detect crashes (segfaults), aborts, all kinds of emitted signals, non-zero program return code and program hanging.

Unique features in comparison with CppUnit, Boost and Google Test:

  • Automatic generation of test data and input arguments (even for complex data types)
  • Modern and highly reusable specialized types instead of fixtures and templates
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