GoogleTest vs CppUnit: The facts

Question

In the process of setting our C++ unit testing framework for the next years we shortlisted GoogleTest and CppUnit. I have some experience with both and my heavy preference is GoogleTest. Anyways to convince my boss I need some facts so I did some reading on the Internet, including the manuals, wiki pages and some of the sources. I came up with a list of GoogleTest advantages and a single CppUnit advantage(graphic test runners). Here they are ordered by perceived usefulness:

• INSTANTIATE_TEST_CASE_P to instantiate a test case with any set of parameters you want, including Cartesian products
• FRIEND_TEST for testing private class members(for all the legacy code)
• turning asserts into breakpoints
• non-fatal asserts
• "out of the box" googlemock integration
• automatic tests detection, no need to enumerate them
• tests can be disabled and enabled
• tests to run can be selected using name patterns
• value/type-parameterized tests
• user-defined predicate asserts
• death tests
• much richer set of asserts
• type asserts
• asserting on subroutines
• additional debug info can be added to asserts using <<
• RecordProperty emits last value of property to the XML output
• SCOPED_TRACE helps understand the context of an assertion failure coming from inside a sub-routine or loop.
• xUnit XML output, can be shown by Jenkins right away without a XSLT transformation in between
• supports custom types printers
• time consumed by test indication(I suspect this is also possible with CppUnit but I haven figured it out yet)
• test event listener API (user-defined plug-ins)
• test shuffling
• no exceptions and RTTI

Am I correct in assuming that all of the above are not supported by CppUnit? Is there an useful GoogleTest feature not available in CppUnit I am missing?

And last but not least: Are there any nice CppUnit features that GoogleTest lacks?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you use older version of gcc compiler or if your code under tests runs on vxWorks (or VxSim) you might have a better chance with cppUnit than Googletest framework.

On the other hand, another feature of the googletest framework is availability of 3 different levels of setup/teardown:

• per program
• per test case (or test group)
• per individual test instances

Not sure if this is supported in cppUnit, but this might come very handy, especially with legacy systems.

Also, there is a googletest plugin for Eclipse CDT.

Answer 2

If you haven't looked at xUnit++, I made it specifically because I was unhappy with what was available (including gtest). Most of your list is supported, and if not, if it's a "must have" feature, I'd probably be willing to add it.