This repo has two scripts to help C and C++ programmers drag unwilling legacy C and C++ into a test harness.

The recipe for getting legacy C/C++ is described in TDD How-to: Get your Legacy C Into a Test Harness

Runs the makefile in the working directory, captures the output and makes a suggestion about how to solve the current problem. If you use CppUTest, some suggestions can be cut and pasted into your makefile.

Finally, when you get to linker errors, legacy-build will run gen-xfakes to generate eploding fakes to get you past linker problems and on to running your code.

Set your build so that it fails on the first error. For gcc and clang -Wfatal-errors.

So far, this has been tested on

• ubuntu gcc version 9.3.0.
• mac osx gcc version 7.4.0

Generate exploding fakes from c/c++ linker error output (used for unit testing).

For C linker errors, the resutling file can be added to the build and those link errors go away. They later turn into runtime errors as exit the test runner whenever you code executes and exploding fake. For C++ errors, you need to do some editing.

Capture the linker error output and feed it to the gen-xfakes.sh

$ make 2>error-output.txt
$ path/to/gen-xfakes.sh error-output.txt xfakes

gen-xfakes.sh produces three files with the supplied basename xfakes

• g++ linker output
• clang
• Visual Studio -- best guess
• Feel free to give me a contribution
• All these compilers are moving target, so you may have to fiddle with it.

See test/example-output/gcc-link-errors.txt for example input. The output files are found in test/golden.

A full explanation of how to use gen-xfakes is on my blog here.

Clone everying including the tests

$ git clone <repo>
$ git submodule update --init

Run the tests

cd tests
./all-tests.sh