What if built doctest as static library instead of header-only

[zchrissirhcz]

Just feeling everytime including doctest.h is too large for generated .o fille.

Browsing the official CMakeLists.txt, feeling too complicated.

What if I just use doctest like the following? What features/details will be affected, comparing to using the default provided doctest.h ?

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.15)

project(demo)

add_library(doctest STATIC
    doctest/doctest_fwd.h
    doctest/doctest.cpp
)
target_compile_definitions(doctest PRIVATE -DDOCTEST_CONFIG_IMPLEMENT_WITH_MAIN)

add_executable(demo
    src/main.cpp
)
target_link_libraries(demo doctest)
target_include_directories(demo
    PUBLIC "${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/doctest"
)

src/main.cpp

#include "doctest_fwd.h"

int factorial(int number) { 
    return number > 1 ? factorial(number - 1) * number : 1;
}

TEST_CASE("testing the factorial function") {
    CHECK(factorial(0) == 1);
    CHECK(factorial(1) == 1);
    CHECK(factorial(2) == 2);
    CHECK(factorial(3) == 6);
    CHECK(factorial(10) == 3628800);
}

[onqtam]

This is perfectly fine, but it should be identical to just using the doctest.h header directly - by default including doctest.h is the same as including just doctest_fwd.h and the generated .o files should be the same.

Also the default cmake files provide a static library you can directly link to: doctest_with_main

[zchrissirhcz]

@onqtam Thanks for reply.

Let me make it more clear, I guess puting doctest.h in my main.cpp will cause that, each time main.cpp is compilied (not linking), the functions/classes inside doctest.h will be compiled again. Not very clear about how much time it will cost, but I think it may save time. Also considering that there are more .cpp files in my project, then I would like to keep the compilation output as small as possible. Thus, I thought using doctest as an library would be more suitable for me.

Yes, including doctest.h, the header-only manner, will be suitable for many other situation.