Announcing FsCheck 0.5

Another month has gone by, another release of FsCheck is a fact. (No, I won't keep this up). Check out the goodies.

Major:

• Shrinking, which was introduced in FsCheck 0.4, is now fully customizable per type. This concludes the integration of Neil Mitchell's shrinking code (modulo the extra bugs I introduced, obviously)
• Combining properties using and, or, and giving a name to subproperties, similar to functionality in a port of QuickCheck to Scala: scalacheck
• Model based testing for stateful types, another shameless scalacheck rip-off. A surprisingly small extension to FsCheck that allows you to check stateful object types.
• Thanks to some excellent feedback from Ganesh (from the Crédit Suisse team, which has been generous with contributions; thanks!) property combinators have become more general, in particular any Lazy<property> can now be tested (as opposed to only Lazy<bool> in 0.4).

Minor

• New property combinators: throws (expect an exception), within (expect a result within some time). The latter is from QuickCheck 2.
• New generator combinators: listOf, constant, suchThat, suchThatMaybe, again from QuickCheck 2.
• Pretty printing and shrinking of function values. You guessed it, ported from QuickCheck 2.
• Added support to TypeClass.fs to define typeclasses of arrays (this needs to be special cased since an array is not an ordinary generic type. Hurray for the consistencies of language design). FsCheck now also knows how to generate and shrink arrays.
• Added makefile for Mono users, thanks to toyvo. I've tried to keep it up to date, but have not tested it so let me know if you have any problems.
• Various bug fixes and smaller improvements.Notably the generator for discriminated unions should now produce "bigger" values, and the float generator now generates NaN, Infinity and Epsilon fairly often.

With these changes, I can safely say that FsCheck 0.5 has reached near feature parity with the combination(!) of both QuickCheck 2.1.0.1 and Scalacheck 1.5. Not bad for half a release on a technology preview platform.

I plan to let this stabilize over the next few months, and finally adding those FsChecks to FsCheck itself - FsCheck is fornicating priestware at the moment (*). I have however used FsCheck fairly frequently in private projects and I must say it has helped me a lot. Hopefully I'll have time to blog more about my experiences soon.

As usual, let me know if you have any feedback, always a pleasure to hear from you!

(*) i.e. it does not practice what it preaches

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