Post author here btw, happy to take questions, whether they're about Hegel in particular, property-based testing in general, or some variant on "WTF do you mean you wrote rust bindings to a python library?"

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nz an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Not really a question. Just wanted to express my gratitude for Hypothesis. I use it regularly. A few years back, I had to build a semi-formally-verified fund and account management service, and used the state-based-testing of Hypothesis to validate its correctness. Cannot express how invaluable this little framework has been.

A little while after that, I spoke to someone in the pharma-adjacent-space who was looking at Antithesis to validate their product. At the time, Antithesis (the company) told him that it was a bad fit. I suggested something akin to my previous approach (which did not include antithesis). No clue what they ended up doing, but it is nice to see that Hypothesis and Antithesis have finally joined forces.

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Chinjut 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You mention in the post that there are design differences between Hegel/Hypothesis and QuickCheck, partly due to attitude differences between Python/non-Haskell programmers and Haskell programmers. As someone coming from the Haskell world (though by no means considering Haskell a perfect language), could you expand on what kinds of differences these are?

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DRMacIver 5 hours ago | parent [-]

So I think a short list of big API differences are something like:

* Hypothesis/Hegel are very much focused on using test assertions rather than a single property that can be true or false. This naturally drives a style that is much more like "normal" testing, but also has the advantage that you can distinguish between different types of failing test. We don't go too hard on this, but both Hegel and Hypothesis will report multiple distinct failures if your test can fail in multiple ways.

* Hegelothesis's data generation and how it interacts with testing is much more flexible and basically fully imperative. You can basically generate whatever data you like wherever in your test you like, freely interleaving data generation and test execution.

* QuickCheck is very much type-first and explicit generators as an afterthought. I think this is mostly a mistake even in Haskell, but in languages where "just wrap your thing in a newtype and define a custom implementation for it" will get you a "did you just tell me to go fuck myself?" response, it's a nonstarter. Hygel is generator first, and you can get the default generator for a type if you want but it's mostly a convenience function with the assumption that you're going to want a real generator specification at some point soon.

From an implementation point of view, and what enables the big conveniences, Hypothesis has a uniform underlying representation of test cases and does all its operations on them. This means you get:

* Test caching (if you rerun a failing test, it will immediately fail in the same way with the previously shrunk example)

* Validity guarantees on shrinking (your shrunk test case will always be ones your generators could have produced. It's a huge footgun in QuickCheck that you can shrink to an invalid test case)

* Automatically improving the quality of your generators, never having to write your own shrinkers, and a whole bunch of other quality of life improvements that the universal representation lets us implement once and users don't have to care about.

The validity thing in particular is a huge pain point for a lot of users of PBT, and is what drove a lot of the core Hypothesis model to make sure that this problem could never happen.

The test caching is because I personally hated rerunning tests and not knowing whether it was just a coincidence that they were passing this time or that the test case had changed.

	▲	pfdietz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'd love to see all this integrated with mutation testing, the thing being looked for being that the test input kills the mutant.

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anentropic 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

TBH reading the first few words of that section I was definitely expecting it to continue "so we used Claude to rewrite Hypothesis in Rust..." so that was quite a surprise!

	▲	DRMacIver 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's on the agenda! We definitely want to rewrite the Hegel core server in rust, but not as much as we wanted to get it working well first. My personal hope is that we can port most of the Hypothesis test suite to hegel-rust, then point Claude at all the relevant code and tell it to write us a hegel-core in rust with that as its test harness. Liam thinks this isn't going to work, I think it's like... 90% likely to get us close enough to working that we can carry it over the finish line. It's not a small project though. There are a lot of fiddly bits in Hypothesis, and the last time I tried to get Claude to port it to Rust the result was better than I expected but still not good enough to use.

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mullr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why would I use this over the existing Proptest library in Rust?

	▲	DRMacIver 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Answered this over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506274

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peytongreen_dev 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]