Recently just engaged with Zig, and I really like it. Strongly believe in that "Favor reading code over writing code." So I start to do something with it, and then I start to wonder how to use coverage tools.
Then I have read this wonderful article here
https://zig.news/squeek502/code-coverage-for-zig-1dk1, and learned kcov as such as amazing tool: fast and easy to use, and it works without any headache.
There is only one thing letting me down, which is that I do not find any instructions in kcov on how to ignore some lines in source code for not covering.
And as Zig has unreachable and @panic which should never be covered, so I spend some time wondering in the cpp code base of kcov.
Turns out, it is easier than I image, so I forked kcov and create my own version.
- It can recognise zig's
unreachableand@panic, auto ignore it. - I also added the ability to add
/* no-cover */in c/cpp source code so that can make kcov ignore some lines too.
The result is quite satisfying to myself, like
this one auto ignoring unreachable
or this one auto ignoring @panic
or this one manual ignoring line with /* no-cover */
The repo is here:
https://github.com/liyu1981/kcov/tree/kcov-zig
Hope it is useful for not just me :)
Top comments (4)
Awesome writeup, thank you for sharing. I guess the next step would be to add a build.zig file to kcov :^)
did my try, and now with a build.zig works on macos M1 at here: github.com/liyu1981/kcov/tree/buil.... Zig is awesome.
meanwhile found an tricky part of Zig: zig debug build will make kcov stop working while CMake debug will keep it working. Write down my findings as an issue here: github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/18521
The issue: github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/18521 is resolved by adding "-fno-sanitize=undefined" to cflags. Now this build.zig works smoothly to compile kcov with zig!
This sounds like a more challenge practice to me on getting familiar with build.zig. I will try :)