Other Frameworks for C

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2.1 Other Frameworks for C

The authors know of the following additional unit testing frameworks for C:

GNU Autounit: Much along the same lines as Check, including forking to run unit tests in a separate address space (in fact, the original author of Check borrowed the idea from GNU Autounit). GNU Autounit uses GLib extensively, which means that linking and such need special options, but this may not be a big problem to you, especially if you are already using GTK or GLib. See the GNU Autounit homepage.
cUnit: Also uses GLib, but does not fork to protect the address space of unit tests. See the archived cUnit homepage.
CUnit: Standard C, with plans for a Win32 GUI implementation. Does not currently fork or otherwise protect the address space of unit tests. In early development. See the CUnit homepage.
CppUnit: The premier unit test framework for C++; you can also use it to test C code. It is stable, actively developed, and has a GUI interface. The primary reasons not to use CppUnit for C are first that it is quite big, and second you have to write your tests in C++, which means you need a C++ compiler. If these don't sound like concerns, it is definitely worth considering, along with other C++ unit testing frameworks. See the CppUnit homepage.
MinUnit: A minimal set of macros and that's it! The point is to show how easy it is to unit test your code. See the MinUnit homepage.
CUnit for Mr. Ando: A CUnit implementation that is fairly new, and apparently still in early development. See the CUnit for Mr. Ando homepage.

This list was last updated in March 2006. If you know of other C unit test frameworks, please send an email plus description to check-devel@lists.sourceforge.net and we will add the entry to this list.

It is the authors' considered opinion that forking or otherwise trapping and reporting signals is indispensable for unit testing (but it probably wouldn't be hard to add that to frameworks without that feature). Try 'em all out: adapt this tutorial to use all of the frameworks above, and use whichever you like. Contribute, spread the word, and make one a standard. Languages such as Java and Python are fortunate to have standard unit test frameworks; it would be desirable that C have one as well.