Etna: An Evaluation Platform for Property-Based Testing

2026-03-27

AI Summary

This work addresses the lack of a systematic evaluation platform for property-based testing (PBT), which has hindered informed selection among frameworks and generation strategies. To bridge this gap, we present ETNA—the first unified and extensible infrastructure for PBT evaluation—integrating mainstream PBT frameworks from Coq, Haskell, OCaml, Racket, and Rust within a modular architecture that enables flexible extension and automated performance benchmarking. Through a series of empirical experiments under realistic workloads, ETNA facilitates fair comparisons across diverse PBT approaches, uncovering critical performance trade-offs among generation strategies. Our results provide practitioners with reliable guidance for framework selection and establish a foundational step toward standardized evaluation methodologies in the PBT landscape.

Abstract

Property-based testing is a mainstay of functional programming, boasting a rich literature, an enthusiastic user community, and an abundance of tools~ -- so many, indeed, that new users may have difficulty choosing. Moreover, any given framework may support a variety of strategies for generating test inputs; even experienced users may wonder which are better in any given situation. Sadly, the PBT literature, though long on creativity, is short on rigorous comparisons to help answer such questions. We present ETNA, a platform for empirical evaluation and comparison of PBT techniques. ETNA incorporates a number of popular PBT frameworks and testing workloads from the literature, and its extensible architecture makes adding new ones easy, while handling the technical drudgery of performance measurement. To illustrate its benefits, we use ETNA to carry out several experiments with popular PBT approaches in Rocq, Haskell, OCaml, Racket, and Rust, allowing users to more clearly understand best practices and tradeoffs.

Problem

• property-based testing
• evaluation platform
• test input generation
• framework comparison
• empirical evaluation

Innovation

• property-based testing
• evaluation platform
• empirical comparison
• test input generation
• extensible architecture