Re: Test framework; new counter class

[Albert Strasheim]

Hello,

On Tue, 31 Dec 2002, Federico Montesino Pouzols wrote:

>       Well, both things -the unified counter template and the
> CppUnit tests- are very interesting.
> 
>       One point that you should take into account for the atomic
> counter stuff is that we removed the use of asm/atomic.h (actually
> there should not be any references to it left) a few weeks ago. Look
> for a bug report that we received from the debian maintainer of
> commoncpp2, at the September and October archives of bug-commoncpp. I
> think we should not wait to add the counter template to HEAD, and if
> you think the interface is stable, it should also get into RELEASE1.

I'll look at the atomic.h stuff now.

Most of the UberCounter code (with the exception of the atomic stuff on 
Win32) is probably done and has been reasonably well tested.

Furthermore, are the current list of operator methods sufficient? In 
deciding which operators to implement, I basically looked at kind of 
stuff you do to a counter variable in a for(;;) loop. UberCounter 
wasn't intended to be a complete numeric type. Has this been achieved?

One addition might be an operator() method, but I still need to 
investigate how this is utilized by other libraries, specifically the 
STL (used by sort algorithms?). Anyone?

A question: do you intend for UberCounter to replace the existing 
counter classes? If so, I think it should be renamed to Counter, taking 
the place of the existing Counter<T>.

As I understand it, this will be 1.1 release, so we might be justified 
in cleaning up the counters in the library. It should be noted that old 
code will have to be slightly modified to make use of UberCounter if it 
replaces Counter<T>, MutexCounter, and AtomicCounter.

>       If there are no more last minute updates or suggestions for
> the CppUnit part of the patch for now, I would add it to CVS. Or do
> you, Albert and Chad, prefer to merge or compare your tests before?

I think Chad is preparing some patches that contain his CppUnit work so 
far. I'd like to take a look at what he has done before we decide on a 
final framework for implementing the tests. Chad?

Cheers,

Albert