It’s day one of adding tests to your legacy C code. You get stopped dead when the compiler announces that the code you are coaxing into the test harness can’t be compiled on this machine. You are stuck on the Make it compile step of Crash to Pass.
Moving your embedded legacy C code (embedded C code without tests) into a test harness can be a challenge. The legacy C code is likely to be tightly bound to the target processor. This might not be a problem for production, but for off-target unit testing, it is a big problem.
For C we have a limited mechanisms for breaking dependencies. In my book, I describe at length link-time and function pointer substitutions, but only touch on preprocessor stubbing.
In this article we’ll look at #include
Test-Double as a way to break dependencies on a problem #include
file.