Title: A promise checked is a promise kept: Inspection Testing,
Abstract: Occasionally, developers need to ensure that the compiler treats their code
in a specific way that is only visible by inspecting intermediate or final
compilation artifacts. This is particularly common with carefully crafted
compositional libraries, where certain usage patterns are expected to trigger
an intricate sequence of compiler optimizations -- stream fusion is a
well-known example.
The developer of such a library has to manually inspect build artifacts and
check for the expected properties. Because this is too tedious to do often, it
will likely go unnoticed if the property is broken by a change to the library
code, its dependencies or the compiler. The lack of automation has led to
released versions of such libraries breaking their documented promises.
This indicates that there is an unrecognized need for a new testing paradigm,
inspection testing, where the programmer declaratively describes non-functional
properties of an compilation artifact and the compiler checks these properties.
We define inspection testing abstractly, implement it in the context of Haskell
and show that it increases the quality of such libraries.