Comments on: TATFT: Test Private Methods in C++

By: youchao

youchao — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:14:53 +0000

it won’t link in visual studio,you can only cheat the compiler,not the linker.

By: brian

brian — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 04:47:39 +0000

#define class struct will crash and burn tons of places, especially with MSVC.

A better solution is to adopt a convention that all class declarations must explicity use public/private labels and not ever rely on implied labeling.

Thanx for the posting. While testing private functions has never been an issue for the code base I’m working on, it has sometimes been irritating.

I wonder if some similar hack could be used as a way to get around declaring “friend” classes and functions, or better yet, give anonymous namespace functions in the implementation files access to the protected/private interface.

By: John Trupiano

John Trupiano — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:25:18 +0000

Am I being mocked, haha? The technique worked well for me in my isolated scenario. Thanks for chiming in, and adding that extra bit of info regarding this breaking templates.

Keep in mind my goal was simply to be able to unit test private methods.

By: ariels

ariels — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 06:49:33 +0000

It is always nice to see this old C++ joke about how C programmers compile C++ using “c++ -Dprivate=public -Dprotected=public -Dclass=struct”. Even if it is somehow being seriously considered.

You will also need to

#define class struct

to get this to work, of course. Which breaks templates.