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Comment by genbattle | Hacker News Reader

Have you looked into using the built-in testing[1] library for unit tests; it seems very full-featured to me. In Go the flag[2] package contains the command-line argument parsing functionality.

Is it that you didn't know about these libraries, or that they don't meet your requirements? If the latter, what do you require from each of them that they do not already deliver?

[1] http://golang.org/pkg/testing/ [2] http://golang.org/pkg/flag/

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I have used (and continue to use) both of these libraries. The testing library works fine but it doesn't include much other than the bare minimum. A more batteries-included library could include some assertion methods to test for value equality/inequality and provide some pre-canned error messages.

As for the flag package, it's fine for simple command-line flags but doesn't have anything to deal with specifying positional arguments. Sure you can get them from the Args() method but you have to basically write another layer of argument handling to deal with them. I like Python's argparse module's approach and flexibility there.

> A more batteries-included library could include some assertion methods to test for value equality/inequality and provide some pre-canned error messages.

For value equality, just use reflect.DeepEqual[1]. The wiki also has a page on table driven tests, which is worth a read[2].

[1]: http://golang.org/pkg/reflect/#DeepEqual [2]: http://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/TableDrivenTests

Just the other day I stumbled upon that wiki page, it looks like a pretty reasonable technique and I've started adopting it.

Thanks for the pointer to the reflect package, I shall check it out.

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