Gobco measures branch coverage of Go code.
Gobco should be used in addition to go test -cover,
rather than replacing it.
For example, gobco does not detect functions or methods that are completely
unused, it only notices them if they contain any conditions or branches.
Gobco also doesn't cover select statements.
With go1.17 or later:
$ go install github.com/rillig/gobco@latest
With go1.16:
$ go get github.com/rillig/gobco
Older go releases are not supported.
To run gobco on a single package, run it in the package directory:
$ gobco
The output typically looks like the following example, taken from package netbsd.org/pkglint:
ok netbsd.org/pkglint 23.454s
Branch coverage: 9788/9866
category.go:188:7: condition "value.IsAbs()" was 354 times false but never true
distinfo.go:265:8: condition "alg == \"SHA1\"" was 16 times false but never true
distinfo.go:319:13: condition "remainingHashes[0].algorithm == alg" was 8 times true but never false
...
mkcondsimplifier.go:142:38: condition "p[2] == p[1]-'a'+'A'" was 9 times true but never false
...
vartypecheck.go:1010:11: condition "len(invalid) > 1" was once false but never true
vartypecheck.go:1613:42: condition "cv.MkLines.pkg != nil" was 8 times true but never false
vartypecheck.go:1615:6: condition "distname.IsConstant()" was 8 times true but never false
If you want to ensure that a certain condition in your code is covered by the tests, you can insert the desired condition into the code and just assign it to the underscore:
func square(x int) int {
_ = x > 50
_ = x == 0
_ = x < 0
return x * x
}The compiler will see that these conditions are side-effect-free and will thus optimize them away, so there is no runtime overhead.
Since the above conditions are syntactically recognizable as boolean expressions, gobco inserts its coverage code around them.
Note that for boolean expressions that don't clearly look like boolean
expressions, you have to write cond == true instead of a simple cond since
as of March 2021, gobco only analyzes the code at the syntactical level,
without resolving any types.