Because MoonScript is written in MoonScript, and MoonScript specs are written in MoonScript, you need to be aware of which copy of MoonScript is actually executing the specs.
A system installed version of MoonScript is recommended to run the specs (and for development). This means that you'll typically have two versions of MoonScript available in the load path:
- The system version
- The version in the current directory
A system install is recommended because you'll always want a functioning version of MoonScript to compile with in case you break your development version.
When developing you want to make ensure the tests are executing your changes in the current directory, and not testing the system install.
Busted itself is MoonScript aware, so it means it should have a functional
MoonScript compiler in order to load the .moon
test files. This should be the
system install. After booting your specs though, you would like to use the
current directory version of MoonScript to the test
Because by default Busted will have the system install take precedence over the
loaded version, running require "moonscript.base"
within a test you won't get
the working directory version of the code that you should be testing.
The with_dev
spec helper will ensure that any require calls within the spec
that ask for MoonScript modules. with_dev
calls a setup and teardown that
replaces _G.require
with a custom version.
You'll use it like this:
import with_dev from require "spec.helpers"
describe "moonscript.base", ->
with_dev!
it "should load code", ->
-- the local version is loaded
moonscript = require "moonscript"
moonscript.load "print 12"
Note that with_dev
's require
function will not use the MoonLoader, it will
only load the .lua
files in the working directory directory, not the moon
ones. This means you must compile the working directory version of MoonScript
before running the tests.
There is a make task to conveniently do all of this:
make test
The test suite has a series of syntax tests (spec/lang_spec.moon
) that
consist of a bunch of .moon
files and their expected output. These files
should capture a large range of syntax that can be verified to have the correct
output when you make changes to the language.
If you are adding new syntax, or changing the expected output, then these tests
will fail until you rebuild the expected outputs. You can do this by running
the syntax test suite with the BUILD
environment variable set.
There is a make task to conveniently do this:
make build_test_outputs
The syntax specs have performance timing collection built in. To get these
times run the test suite with the TIME
environment variable set.
TIME=1 busted spec/lang_spec.moon
Any changes to the compiler should not introduce any substantial performance decreases.