[Mono-list] Jacks Compiler Test Suite

[Alexander Klyubin]

In one of the projects (http://www.refactorit.com) of the company I work 
for it is necessary to be able to parse Java code into ASG. We found 
ourselves writing an automated test suite with different code snippets 
that our parser couldn't parse and then worked towards fixing the bugs 
in the parser.

Later we discovered an excellend suite of several thousand of ready-made 
Java compiler tests. Namely, the Jacks project 
(http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/jacks/). Jacks test suite 
started as a part of open-source Java compiler jikes. Each test is 
basically one or more .java files that must either compile or fail. So 
the tests only check the parser part of compiler. We integrated roughly 
half of this test suite into our project. Now we have 1350 or so parsing 
tests which cover most aspects of Java Language Specification. This is 
much better than 50 or so we had prior to this.

I'm not aware of any such project for C# compiler. But, at first one can 
probably borrow many test cases from Jacks test suite and use them in 
Mono C# compiler test suite. Manual inspection and modification of tests 
will be required because those are Java tests. But I believe Mono #C 
compiler coould import at least thousand tests or so. Additionally, if 
might be a good idea to start a separate (sub)project for this. Because 
having such a freely available and large test suite pays for other 
projects creating C# compiler or parser.

Regards,
Alexander Klyubin