Celebrating 100,000 downloads of serial_test

23 Jun 2020

Rust  serial_test 

About 18 months ago I was wondering how to make Rust tests run in serial occasionally and I wrote a little crate called serial_test to solve this. I was digging through some other things, and idly noted that serial_test now has over 100,000 downloads, and so it’s probably a good time for a little retrospective on it.

There’s been a few notable changes since the original blog post:

• Now only need to add serial_test to your dependencies and serial_test_derive gets automagically dealt with behind the scenes
• Copes with nested test function calls
• Allows for test functions that return Result
• Works with ignore and should_panic attributes

A few thanks:

• The amazing David Tolnay for syn and quote which takes macro work like this from “screaming nightmare” to “actually quite nice really”
• Ben Boeckel for figuring out how to get serial_test users to only have to import one crate
• Various bug reporters without which I would never have found about serial_test breaking in new and novel ways
• Travis CI for putting up with all the builds I get them to do on a pretty much daily basis
• docs.rs for hosting my docs

Here’s to the next 100,000!

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