Clojurians Log v2

I'm working on a biginteger generator for test.check, presumably to be used by spec as well (directly or indirectly); the main decision to make is what the distribution should be. Here's what I've got so far, interested in any comments. https://gist.github.com/gfredericks/b6b59f1c531dc36017e45f2f0beeff9e

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let’s say i want to test some stateful thing by generating a sequence of actions to perform

how do i use state to inform future generated actions?

simple example: let’s say i want to test a growable array class with three methods: getLength, append, and getNth

that was easy to test, but as soon as i wanted to test setNth, i was at a loss

how do i make it so that setNth can check getLength first?

my current hack is to just do modulo math at the time of applying the action - but that only works for this simple example & i have more complex stuff i want to test

my best guest is to try defining generators recursively, deferred by an fmap or bind or something - but wasn’t sure if that was a hack or recommended or what

ie parameterize them based on a model of the state

the general approach is to first build a (random) model, then produce the action list via fmap/bind

not 100% sure i follow. is there a super simple example somewhere?

There's a whole lib for this kind of thing I think

https://github.com/czan/stateful-check

i’m looking at two such libraries now, trying to see if they clarify things for me: stateful-check and states

I haven't used either, but I've reviewed stateful-check a bit and it seems solid

there’s a non-trivial amount of code in this lib. i’ll study it, but i’m hoping to identify the essence of it.

@bbloom do you understand the idea of modeling the whole interaction ahead of time?

it’s been a while since I’ve looked at collection-check but I know it does a lot of this operation kind of thing (can’t remember if it’s stateful though)

so i haven’t used test-check in anger at all, but i did successfully roll my own generative/simulation testing thing in go for a wire protocol. but that was a hierarchical temporal marckov model, i didn’t do shrinking, and i did all the validation later on the log file - worked mostly as a stress test for a long running system

to get multiple tests, i didn’t have a backtracking generator type thing - instead just ran a bunch in parallel, since they were also testing limited hardware resources (ie physical devices)

I think the shrinking model is the biggest reason that the generate-everything-up-front approach works best

so i have a bit of a grasp on the concepts, but no knowledge of the specific apis

sooo now back to your question: i’m not sure what you mean “modeling the whole itneraction ahead of time”

the only viable alternative I've seen is the python/hypothesis approach which is extremely imperative and wildly different

@alexmiller: i’m looking at collection-check, as what i’m doing is quite similar. thanks

@bbloom I mean the generator generates the entire intended interaction, e.g. - insert a - insert b - read 0, expect a - read 1, expect b - etc.

I believe this is essentially the idea behind stateful-check

it does all the wiring-up for you

yeah, so i’m trying to test some java code that is stateful & i’m successfully generating a sequence of actions & applying them

the tricky bit is the bit that stateful-check seems to address: using the state of the model in order inform the generators

"Why can't I call generators in the middle of my test?" is a common thing people run into; currently test.check doesn't try to give you a way to do that, but I'm not 100% convinced it can't be done

I've thought about it a lot; the shrinking is the hard part

the fact that it’s asked for a lot leads me to wonder: is it a misunderstanding that leads to it being wanted? or it just hard to provide?

ie should i be thinking about it differently?

We've done a number of sim testing projects at Cognitect that pushed this kind of thing really far

But there you don't really care about shrinking at all

glad to hear that - since i had no use for shrinking in my sim test and wondered if i was just missing out

I'd ask @luke about some of those ideas - he has some libs that I think are oss that do statistical / stateful generative stuff

this is the first time i wanted to test something that felt complex enough to justify test check and not complex enough to justify distributed sim testing

it should be possible to write a thingamajigger to call generators in the test deterministically, without doing any shrinking

In general with sim testing you want some simple (ish) model how users use the system such that you can generate realistic (ish) streams of random activity

yeah - in my case, i simulated a police officer on patrol. turning cameras on and off, watching videos, driving to and from places with or without wifi, etc

worked nicely

Yeah, exactly

Our domains were a lot more complicated :)

i’d imagine

Cognitect does arch consult gigs, just saying :)

🙂

...arch?

architecture

like...CPU chips? big buildings?

large-scale computer systems?

That

Really any scale :)

Architecture review

i don’t work on that any more, but the team seems quite happy with the architecture i built for them - which is largely clojure/hickey-inspired, thank you very much 😉

@gfredericks i don’t quite understand the api well enough yet to know if that code is useful to me

@bbloom I added an example

the idea is you generate one of these fs and then you can call it from the body of your property as many times as you want with arbitrary generators

it's a stateful function, whose state is randomness derived from the normal test.check source of randomness, so the whole thing should be deterministic as long as you don't call the function in nondeterministic ways

i’m not sure i need something that sophisticated

so e.g., if you have your stateful java collection and want to generate a valid index, you'd call (f (gen/choose 0 (dec (.getLength thingamajig))))

and that call would return an index between 0 and (dec (.getLength thingamajig))

the sophistication is mostly to satisfy my own ideals of reproducibility

if you couldn't care less about that you can just call gen/generate and not bother with any of this

so i don’t actually need to call .getLength on the real stateful object during test execution

i just want to track some state in the model & use that to inform which actions to generate

looking at collection-check, they seem to use clojure’s types as a model

but zach does basically what i mentioned earlier: he generates wild indexes for nth/assoc and then fixes them up during execution

how much am i expected to know about the rose tree stuff in order to make effective use of test-check? this stateful-check thing manipulates it quite a bit, plus has some gen-do monadic bind syntax etc that seems redundant w/ fmap, gen/let, etc

users don't normally need to care about the rose tree

my guess is that stateful-check's low-level internals are an attempt to shrink better than the naive shrinking you get by making a pile of binds

gen/bind is pretty dumb about shrinking

and stateful-check might be able to make assumptions that bind can't

maybe a simple example of generating a model with actions would be helpful

gimme a minute

thanks for your help. greatly appreciated

you too @alexmiller

i’m still reading and trying to make sense of stateful-check, but some things concern me

for example, command argument generation seems to attempt to implicitly and recursively lift values to be generators

which seems like magic i don’t want, at least not before i am comfortable w/ the monadic api

meanwhile, i’m failing to extract the essence from the core of the generate-commands* routine

yeah I've never liked the values-can-be-generators idea

in practice it's probably not too confusing

....maybe

….maybe with a type system? 😛

yeah 🙂

could fancy it up to add the intermediate state at each step, or generate random assertions if you don't want to just compare the whole map

note that the gen/lets are where bind is happening

there might be stack problems with this; maybe that's another reason for stateful-check's complexity

e.g., if you wanted to generate 10000 actions you might have problems

yeah - so i tried something like this and got a stackoverflow

but thanks, this example is much closer to my intuition

I just generated 20,000 of these up to the normal max-size of 200 and got no exceptions

looks like the sizes don't get above 20 though

so that might be bad

that's probably why it's not SOing 🙂

😛

to get larger you'd use gen/frequency instead of gen/one-of and tweak the weights

alternately you could generate a size up front and pass that through the recursion

well you had equal assoc/dissoc frequency

yeah

i wasn’t doing any dissoc to reduce the size, so it grew faster

I think stack problems would be related to action-count, not the size of the state

oh, hmm that’s right

not sure what i did, since it’s like 5000 undos ago 🙂

with respect to shrinking: how well does that work as things grow more complex?

i’m somewhat skeptical it can work well for stateful tests - since each removed operation can potentially invalidate the remainder of the operations

that's exactly the problem

if you're using the naive bind structure in my example, what would happen is if test.check tries to shrink an earlier action it will generate a totally new set of following actions

it might be that in practice this isn't as bad as it sounds

I get almost 0 complaints about this

which of course could mean 1) it’s perfect 2) no body is using it or 3) people don’t understand it well enough to complain about it without embarassing themselves like i’m doing now 🙂

I made a ticket about it at least, but don't know if it will lead anywhere https://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/TCHECK-112

yeah exactly

2 isn't plausible; people are definitely using bind, at least via gen/let

in fact gen/let tends to encourage over using bind

i.e., using bind to combine two independent generators in a way that you could do with gen/tuple

does tuple do “parallel” bind? ie it shrinks from any position fairly?

and bind is “left biased”?

that...might be right

tuple shrinks each thing independently

you can always rewrite tuple with bind but not vice versa

gotcha - so tuple is applicative

that's probably true

ok - so i guess i’ve confirmed 1) i understand this and 2) i still have no idea how to use the API 😛 thanks

i’ll keep playing with it

will let you know how it turns out

oh well; do let me know if you have more questions or accusations

heh, i hope the accusations thing was a joke and/or not about me. let me know if i failed to politely convey my gratitude!

oh yeah sorry, definitely a joke

so shrinking only removes elements from the reproduction, right? no rewriting in any way?

i’m attempting a “loose” approach to action generation - will leave state out of that part & use state in the code that “runs” the actions. that will screw up shrinking probably, but i’ll deal with that when i have trouble pinpointing an issue in the future

so like if i were testing that random access stack example from before, actions may just be like “do 5 pushes, then randomly swap elements 8 times, then do two pops, etc….”

and see how that does for me

is there a generator that will (with high likelihood?) test boundary cases such as max/min integers? - the large-integer generator doesn’t seem to explicitly select those, so i guess i need to just use one-of or frequency to ensure those cases get covered (which is relevant to me b/c the code under test does some low level binary fiddling sometimes & i want to make sure it doesn’t screw that up)

i’ve gotta say - the learning curve is relatively steep with this stuff

but that might just be b/c i’m not comfortable using stuff w/o understanding it - and the monadic stuff makes it a bit opaque

for example, it wasn’t immediately clear what a “property” really was under the hood (just a generator that produces a particular shape of data) or that it was safe to use side effecting asserts in such a property

the readme shows an example that returns a boolean

but if i tested each property individually, my tests would be far too slow

spotted http://blog.colinwilliams.name/blog/2015/01/26/alternative-clojure-dot-test-integration-with-test-dot-check/ - which seems like an improvement

while i’m rambling to myself (or whoever is listening?):

i’m not quite happy with my attempts to generate action sequences yet - i’m getting more variability in parameters and less variability in the sequence of actions - i’m not sure how to influence that properly yet

to use the stack example again, i’m getting a lot of tests that try just using different elements to push on the stack, but really what i want is a lot more tests that have longer sequences of pushes/pops/etc

the internal generation strategy doesn’t appear to be documented anywhere. is it a top-down strategy? or a bottom-up one? or some hybrid? i can’t really tell easily, nor what the implications of that would be

Hi

https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C0JKW8K62/p1493238965936535 If you're talking about something like the event modeling code I shared earlier, new events CAN be generated during shrinking

how does that work?

So bind generates a value from one generator, then uses the user supplied function to create a new generator and generates a value from that

That much is straightforward?

yeah

There are two ways to shrink from there

You can shrink the thing generated in the second step - that's the easy way

The hard way is to shrink the thing generated in the first step, because then you're obligated to call the user function with the new smaller value, which returns a potentiality entirely new generator that may have nothing to do with the original second-step value

In any case you can't assume they're related

So the only way to proceed is to generate something entirely new and probably unrelated from that new generator

I suppose you could at least use the same randomness, just in case that helps. I think test.check already does that

i guess i don’t understand the shrinking process at all then - b/c what you’re saying here doesn’t make sense to me

is it just that shrinking re-runs the generators in some “shrink mode” and can do whatever the hell it wants?

So shrinking is not an independent operation on generated values -- it's essentially done at generation time, by each generator in the composition

This is a difference from haskell as I understand it

so is shrinking just “re-generate, but smaller”?

No

i would have expected generate & shrink to be two methods on a protocol

It's not - a generator returns a Very Large lazy tree of values

The root is the generated value; each node's children are ways to shrink from the value at that node

The shrinking algorithm walks that tree

Higher order generators combine these trees

E.g., gen/fmap calls rose/fmap

ah, see, my mental model was one of producer/consumer

emitting generated values

totally wrong apparently 😛

I can't remember if reid came up with it himself, but people don't seem to expect it

I think maybe he guessed the impl based on erlang's API

So perhaps john hughes is the source

My talk Purely Random is about a lot of these details and about how I converted test.check to use an immutable rng

i might have to watch that

I wish I knew how to get slack to notify me of any activity in this channel

Maybe I just did that

so if i do (gen/sample (gen/list gen/int)) for a large sample size - and take the max of the lengths of the lists, it seems to stop at 99

i have no idea what controls that value

and i have no idea how to go about figuring it out lol

There's a doc page in the repo on growth and shrinking

The other thing people don't usually expect is that growth and shrinking are not related

the word “grow” does not appear in any of the .md files in the doc directory 😛

Should be in one of the titles

Growth

nope - maybe it’s somewhere else? i’ve read all the docs in the repo that i could find, heh

Um

I'll find it

https://github.com/clojure/test.check/blob/master/doc/growth-and-shrinking.md

It's new, maybe you didn't have it locally

ah, sorry - my bad. my last pull failed, i have code from december

will read that

lol, i had code checked out from ~2 days before you added that

Haha

ok - that doc gave me a much better idea of how growth & size works. thank you!

however, it didn’t give me much insight in to shrinking

other than the fact that shrinking is unrelated to growth 😛

also, i’m still not clear on how size is related to whether or not a generator is run

for example, if i do this: (gen/sample (gen/vector (gen/resize 0 gen/int)))

i get stuff like [0] multiple times, which i’d expect - but it suggests that the frequency of generator execution is unrelated to the size of the range of the generator

in order to have any confidence… i guess i’m going to need to understand this rose tree thing….

found this explanation: http://reiddraper.com/writing-simple-check/

gen/generate can give you better control than sample for playing with sizing

ok, i think i understand the rose tree / shrinking now….

Reid’s rationale suggests getting a shrinker “for free” from the generator, but i’m skeptical of that approach vs the two-method approach that apparently haskell uses

You're thinking a generator is an implementation of a protocol with one method for generating a value and another for shrinking it?

i did think that, which is apparently true in QuickCheck according to Reid’s blog post

(gen/fmap str gen/nat), e.g.

How do you shrink "42" given a function that can shrink 42

same way it does now? seems like it just divides by two in some complex round-about fashion

It's a string, not a number

ah

sorry, i misread

(defn fmap [f x] (reify IGenerator (gen [this ctx] (f (gen x ctx))) (shrink [this ctx value] (f (shrink x ctx))))

😛

er sub that second value with x

or second x with value

you get the idea

but yeah, i get my intuition doesn’t match reality

but as far as i can tell, the public API of test.check doesn’t expose the rose tree stuff

all the constructors for generators assume you return a value, not a rose tree

which i guess that explains why stateful-check mucks around with internals a bit