Cross compiling unit tests with CppUnit or similar

Question

Has anyone used a package like CppUnit to cross-compile C++ unit tests to run on an embedded platform?

I'm using G++ on a Linux box to compile executables that must be run on a LynxOS board. I can't seem to get any of the common unit test packages to configure and build something that will create unit tests.

I see a lot of unit test packages, CppUnit, UnitTest++, GTest, CppUTest, etc., but very little about using these packages in a cross-compiler scenario. The ones with a "configure" script imply that this is possible, but I can't seem to get them to configure and build.

Answer 1

You might want to look at CxxTest. I have not used it for cross compilation, but it is based entirely on headers and a Python script - no compiled library. It might be easier to adapt than others.

Answer 2

My practice when unit testing code that is cross compiled is to compile the unit tests themselves using the native toolchain -- usually some flavor of x86 compiler. These unit tests execute on the build machine rather than on the embedded target. If you're writing strict unit tests (as opposed to integration tests) with stubs and mocks you shouldn't have dependencies on embedded hardware. If not... it's never too late to start.

One added benefit of this approach is that for non-x86 embedded targets, this type of unit testing helps flush out endianness issues, uninitialized variables and other interesting bugs.

Answer 3

Im not providing an answer here, but i wouldn't take the advice of NOT running your unit tests on different targets : you still need to, preferably both system and unit tests.

Otherwise simple things like alignment errors on ARM/other embedded CPUs will not get caught.