Unit Testing C Code?

Question

I worked on an embedded system this summer written in straight C. It was an existing project that the company I work for had taken over. I have become quite accustomed to writing unit tests in Java using JUnit but was at a loss as to the best way to write unit tests for existing code (which needed refactoring) as well as new code added to the system.Is there any way to make unit testing plain C code as easy as unit testing Java code with, for example, _JUnit_? Any insight that would apply specifically to embedded development (cross-compiling to arm-linux platform) would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Anytime you ask "Is this C thing as easy as this Java thing" The answer is almost always going to be no, just because C is a more complex language with much more control. But I think you might just be asking if there is a framework with an API you can just call.

The answer is that there are actually a bunch! One pretty well known one is call AceUnit (Advanced C and Embedded Unit). Most unit testing frameworks pretty much the same in spirit they just work a little differently or their APIs might impose different syntaxes. AceUnit just provides an API for unit testing, but you'll have to learn it just as you'd have to learn JUnit.

Do a google search for C Unit Testing Framework and you'll find a bunch of good stack overflow posts about them!