Watch mode for tests?

[mbrock]

Issue by pospi
Friday Jan 19, 2018 at 05:10 GMT
Originally opened as dapphub/dapp#74

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Hi all,

Are there any plans to support file watching and incremental compilation / testing for contracts during development? Or is the general opinion that hevm is fast enough that an external tool should be used to trigger a rebuild & re-run?

[mbrock]

Comment by rainbreak
Friday Jan 19, 2018 at 07:23 GMT

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We've not really discussed it. You could probably do incremental build (which uses solc) with something like dapp build src/file.sol (although for non large projects it's pretty quick to just build everything). Incremental test is more tricky, but you could perhaps construct a dependency tree and compare hashes of built contracts.

hevm is pretty quick though, so for small projects you might as well just run everything. For larger projects (e.g. makerdao/sai), it takes a bit longer as everything is in serial, but could maybe be parallelised (again).

Do you have a specific use case in mind? (size of project? in-editor usage?)

[mbrock]

Comment by pospi
Saturday Jan 20, 2018 at 00:52 GMT

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Nothing specific- but near-immediate feedback even for large projects is the goal I'm really hoping to fill. Mainly for realtime development; as in "change file & immediately see feedback". I guess you would need to keep a cache of the dependency tree from each test entrypoint file, and then re-run the affected tests if any files in the tree change?