Test driven development on an Amstrad CPC

[duncan_bayne]

Hi Folks,

I'm trying to develop a (simple, Scheme-like) Lisp for the Amstrad CPC.  I'm hoping to develop it test-first, and my efforts are working so far.

See:
Running tests on an Amstrad CPC on Vimeo

All the source is up at duncan-bayne/zlisp · GitHub if you want to take a look at how I'm doing test driven development on this system. 

Elevator pitch: I have two different build targets.  One provides |REPL to run the Lisp environment (or at least, it will when I'm finished).  The other provides |TESTS to run the automated tests.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask   This has been something of a learning experience for me, trying to follow modern development practices to develop software for an 8-bit micro.

Yours,
Duncan

[Octoate]

Great idea to bring TDD to CPC development. I will have a look at it for sure !

[duncan_bayne]

Great idea to bring TDD to CPC development. I will have a look at it for sure !

Thanks

The rough approach I'm taking is to have two separate targets in the Makefile.  The default is the usual release build, and then there's another that compiles the tests including a main.c that runs them all.  Then, fire up the emulator and run |TESTS.  Here's an example test, checking that my changes to the SDCC heap size worked:

Code Select Expand

#include "lisp_tests.h"

void _test_heap_size();

void _test_heap_size()
{
  /* SDCC defaults to a 1kB heap size; check we have > 30kB to play with */
  void *block = malloc(30720);
  assert(block != NULL);
  free(block);
}

void run_lisp_tests()
{
  RUN_TEST(_test_heap_size);
}


RUN_TEST is a macro defined elsewhere:

Code Select Expand

#define RUN_TEST(a) printf("%s:%d ... ", __FILE__, __LINE__); a(); printf("OK\r\n");

It works well so far but I'm concerned about running out of resources with a complex program and a large test suite.