C Language Test Suites

GCC contains the following C language test suites, in the gcc/testsuite directory:

gcc.dg

This contains tests of particular features of the C compiler, using the more modern dg harness. Correctness tests for various compiler features should go here if possible.

Magic comments determine whether the file is preprocessed, compiled, linked or run. In these tests, error and warning message texts are compared against expected texts or regular expressions given in comments. These tests are run with the options -ansi -pedantic unless other options are given in the test. Except as noted below they are not run with multiple optimization options.

gcc.dg/cpp

This subdirectory contains tests of the preprocessor.

gcc.dg/debug

This subdirectory contains tests for debug formats. Tests in this subdirectory are run for each debug format that the compiler supports.

gcc.dg/format

This subdirectory contains tests of the -Wformat format checking. Tests in this directory are run with and without -DWIDE.

gcc.dg/noncompile

This subdirectory contains tests of code that should not compile and does not need any special compilation options. They are run with multiple optimization options, since sometimes invalid code crashes the compiler with optimization.

gcc.dg/special

FIXME: describe this.

gcc.c-torture

This contains particular code fragments which have historically broken easily. These tests are run with multiple optimization options, so tests for features which only break at some optimization levels belong here. This also contains tests to check that certain optimizations occur. It might be worthwhile to separate the correctness tests cleanly from the code quality tests, but it hasn't been done yet.

gcc.c-torture/compat

FIXME: describe this.

This directory should probably not be used for new tests.

gcc.c-torture/compile

This test suite contains test cases that should compile, but do not need to link or run. These test cases are compiled with several different combinations of optimization options. All warnings are disabled for these test cases, so this directory is not suitable if you wish to test for the presence or absence of compiler warnings. While special options can be set, and tests disabled on specific platforms, by the use of .x files, mostly these test cases should not contain platform dependencies. FIXME: discuss how defines such as NO_LABEL_VALUES and STACK_SIZE are used.

gcc.c-torture/execute

This test suite contains test cases that should compile, link and run; otherwise the same comments as for gcc.c-torture/compile apply.

gcc.c-torture/execute/ieee

This contains tests which are specific to IEEE floating point.

gcc.c-torture/unsorted

FIXME: describe this.

This directory should probably not be used for new tests.

gcc.c-torture/misc-tests

FIXME: describe this, when it should be used for new tests and when it shouldn't.

FIXME: merge in testsuite/README.gcc and discuss the format of test cases and magic comments more.