Avoiding Feature Bloat

[dalon-work]

Following this discussion about Catch2 on reddit. Many people recommend this project as a replacement, mainly to get better compile times and the convenience of a header-only library.

The major complaint with Catch2 is that it got too big, too many features, too much complexity, which is what led to the excessive compile-times in the first place.

I watched your CppCon 2017 presentation, and was impressed. However, I can't help but wonder, what is to keep this project from falling into the same trap? I ask because I'm looking for a unittesting framework for my very large project at work. In order to encourage adoption I want something that has simplicity as its guiding principle, as your project seems to.

[onqtam]

doctest will remain as light, transparent, and easy to use as possible - that's the only reason it exists in the first place. The current API will remain stable and any feature request is evaluated based on the design goals: https://github.com/onqtam/doctest/blob/master/doc/markdown/features.md

This means sometimes saying no to ideas - or at least finding a way to hack around it for a specific use case - outside of the doctest project/codebase.

And as a side note: I would say that a better resource than the CppCon talk is this article - it talks about how to integrate the framework directly in your production code (if you're into that sort of thing): https://blog.jetbrains.com/rscpp/better-ways-testing-with-doctest/

Btw I'm really happy that you filed this issue - now I have something to point to in specific cases! :)