A mocking framework for Emacs

As I’m currently trying to introduce some unit tests for Magit (see the unit-test branch) I realize I really need some mocking capabilities. For some reason, even though we now have a testing framework released with Emacs (ERT), no mocking library found its way to the core (yet?).

In its manual, ERT refers to the 3rd party el-mock.el, but I don’t like the DSL approach too much (feels un-lispy to me) and it has definitions I strongly disagree with ( “Mocks are temporary functions which accept specified arguments and return constant value.”) that make my life harder as a test writer. In my opinion, mocks are supposed to work in a record/replay way, which implies to be able to record different outputs for different (or even same) inputs. Returning a constant value is more of a stub thing. Actually I don’t care too much about the naming, but I need the feature anyway :p

So, even though it is really nice for basic mocking (and achieves very low verbosity), el-mock.el is just not flexible enough for my purpose.

Here comes mocker.el, my attempt at achieving greater mocking flexibility. Admittedly, this is much more verbose, but for some twisted reason I like it better this way :) Note that the architecture is meant to be flexible, so in theory it would even be possible to define a way to express mocking expressions in a DSL similar to el-mock.el’s.

2 quick examples taken from the documentation:

(mocker-let ((foo (x y z)
                  ((:input '(1 2 3) :output 4)
                   (:input '(4 5 6) :output 10)))
             (bar (x)
                  ((:input '(42) :output 4))))
  (+ (foo 1 2 3)
     (foo 4 5 6)
     (bar 42)))
     
;;; make `foo' generate the fibonacci suite, no matter how it's called
(mocker-let ((foo (x)
                  ((:input-matcher (lambda (x) t)
                    :output-generator (lexical-let ((x 0) (y 1))
                                        (lambda (any)
                                          (let ((z (+ x y)))
                                            (setq x y y z))))
                    :max-occur nil))))
  (* (foo 1) (foo 0) (foo 42)))

For more details, please refer to the page of the project. Bottom line, mocker-let is just a macro around flet that specializes in recording expected behaviors, then consuming them.

For what matters, I’d like it a lot if a proper mocking solution (whatever it may be) made its way to Emacs (as part of ERT or not). Maybe if there are enough people interested in this we can come up with something together :)