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Complete overhaul of the difference reporter #124

Merged
merged 1 commit into from
Mar 12, 2019
Merged

Complete overhaul of the difference reporter #124

merged 1 commit into from
Mar 12, 2019

Commits on Mar 12, 2019

  1. Implement a unified difference reporter

    The previous implementation of the reporter simply listed all differences,
    each qualified by the full path to the difference.
    This method of reporting is exact, but difficult for humans to parse.
    It is one of the more common sources of complaints by users and a significant
    reason why cmp is not preferred over competing libraries.
    
    This change reimplements the reporter to format the output as a
    structured literal in pseudo-Go syntax. The output resembles literals that
    the user would likely have in their test code. Differences between the
    x and y values are denoted by a '-' or '+' prefix at the start of the line.
    
    An overview of the new implementation is as follows:
    
    * report.go: The defaultReporter type implements the Reporter interface.
    
    * report_value: Through the PushStep/PopStep API, the defaultReporter is able
    to contruct an in-memory valueNode tree representing the comparison of
    x and y as cmp.Equal walks the sub-values.
    
    * report_compare.go: After report_value.go constructs an AST-representation
    of the compared values, report_compare.go formats the valueNode tree as a
    textNode tree, which is the textual output in a tree form.
    Some relevant design decisions include:
    	* The format logic goes through effort to avoid printing ignored nodes.
    	* Some number of surrounding equal (but not ignored) struct fields,
    	slice elements, or map entries are printed for context.
    	* cmp.Equal may declare two sub-reflect.Values to be equal, but are
    	different values when printed. In order to present a unified view on
    	this "equal" node, the logic formats both values and arbitrarily choses
    	the one with the shorter string.
    	* Transformed nodes are formatted with the pseudo-Go syntax of:
    		Inverse(TransformerName, OutputType{...})
    	where Inverse is some magical pseudo-function that inverts the
    	transformation referred to by TransformerName. The OutputType literal
    	is the output of the transformation.
    
    * report_reflect.go: This contains logic to pretty-print reflect.Values and
    is relied upon by report_compare.go to format the leaves of the tree.
    Note that the leaves of the tree can be any arbitrary Go type and value
    (including cyclic data structures).
    
    * report_text.go: This contains logic for purely lexicographical formatting
    and is depended upon by the other report_*.go files.
    
    Advantages:
    * The output is more familiar as it uses pseudo-Go syntax for literals
    * It provides context about surrounding struct fields, slice elements, or
    map entries that were equal
    * Inserted and removed elements in a slice are easier to visualize
    * Related diffs lie on the same indentation
    * For diffs in a deeply nested value, the output is easier to visualize
    than having a list of all the full paths to the diff.
    
    Disadvantages:
    * The implementation is drastically more complex.
    * In most cases, the output is longer (though more sparse)
    dsnet committed Mar 12, 2019
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