What's New in Google Mock 1.1.0

Three months after we released Google C++ Mocking Framework 1.0.0, we were ready to unveil a new version. Google Mock 1.1.0 is available for download now. It contains several new features we are excited about.

The previous version of Google Mock requires Google Test (as a reminder, a mocking framework is not a testing framework - it works with the latter to help you write better tests). We were aware that such requirement posed difficulty for some people, who cannot (yet) switch away from the testing framework they have already been using. This version of Google Mock can be used with a non-Google-Test testing framework. It still works with Google Test out-of-box, but you can easily configure it to use a different testing framework now.

Two other features make Google Mock much easier to extend than before. If you have used any mocking framework, you know that a matcher is good for validating a value and printing informative diagnostics when the validation fails. Google Mock provides many built-in matchers for the common scenarios, but there will always be a time when you need to write your own matcher. There were several ways to do that in the past, but some new macros just made the task an order of magnitude easier. I will cover this more in another post.

The second extensibility improvement is for actions, which you use to specify what to do when a mock object's member function gets called. Similarly, despite the rich set of built-in actions, sometimes a user will need to define his own. The ACTION and ACTION_P* macros make it trivial.

There are some minor improvements too, like new built-in matchers and actions, and better diagnostics, but I'll stop here for now.