Question

I’m writing a new class where I have inserted a C++ assert() to verify correctness of state.

I would like to use googletest to verify that this assert is being called in the way I expect, but I can’t seem to find a way to do this.

Should I be throwing exceptions instead or is there some other googletest-testable way to validate the state of an object?

Edit: I am also open to gmock alternatives (looking into that now).

Answer 1

Assertions behave differently on different platforms. If they print a message and terminate the program on yours, you can use Google Test’s death tests to verify them. Put a statement that is expected to terminate the program into the EXPECT_DEATH macro:

EXPECT_DEATH(MyFunction(with_argument_that_causes_it_to_abort), "");

This will run the statement in a subprocess and verify that the statement terminates it. You can supply a regular expression in the second parameter to match the subprocess output. This macro was created specifically to verify assert-like calls.

A code built with Visual Studio may display a dialog box and wait for user reaction instead of printing a message, making death tests inconvenient. But you should be able to configure the assertion behavior to not do that.