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What is Jacks?

April 26, 2017Jacks

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What is Jacks?

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The Jacks test suite checks a Java compiler’s conformance to the JLS (Java Language Specification). It’s made up of a large number of small test cases, with each test focused on a specific section of the JLS. Eric Blake, a principal contributor to the Jacks project, describes the benefits of this type of testing in terms of its detail-oriented scope. “By generating small test cases with specified compilation behavior, then automating the execution of each of these cases, a compiler writer or debugger can quickly pinpoint problems in the translation of Java source to bytecodes.” The concept behind the development of Jacks is to simplify running tests with multiple compilers or multiple compiler configurations (a single set of tests, for example, against the last two releases of Jikes and the JDK 1.3 release of Javac). By hand you’d have to repeatedly set environmental variables and check test results against expected results. Using Jacks, you simply cd to the directory that holds the te