Comment by JoshTriplett
8 years ago
> Don't do that. Either write the driving app in Python
Even if you write the driver in Python, you don't necessarily want to call the program you're testing in the same process. You might want independent launches of a command-line tool, so that you test the same behavior people get when they run the tool. Otherwise, your test suite might trip over some internal state that gets preserved from run to run in ways that command-line invocation wouldn't.
Good point, but I didn't mean to sound specific to testing apps. I just meant, in general, write big apps using Python top-down and something precompiled if you must spawn lots of external processes.