Program with GUTs in C with Kevlin Henney

One of the greatest shifts in modern programming practices has been how programmers across many different domains and languages have embraced unit testing. For the C programmer, however, a lot of what has been said and done in the unit testing space, from test-driven development to unit-testing frameworks, has passed them by. Most of the blogs and talks and advice out there is targeted at languages that are some combination of dynamic, managed or object-oriented — which by no stretch of the imagination describes C.

This session looks at the good unit tests (GUTs) and test-driven development (TDD) from the perspective of C. Rather than trying to fake object orientation, what are the composition-oriented styles and tricks that C can support more comfortably? What are the best ways to express and isolate external dependencies for testing? What does it take in code and in mindset to allow unit testing to embrace C?