Support for Rust like #[cfg()] attributes about language

[Wdestroier]

Could this allow a test function (or many) to be appear right after the target function?

trimmed(string) => string.trim();

@test
trimRemovesSurroundingWhitespace() {
  var string = '  foo '
  expect(trimmed(string), equals('foo'))
}

Would be awesome.

[jakemac53]

Could this allow a test function (or many) to be appear right after the target function?

Even if that code is omitted reliably in the final program it does still add a parsing cost to all downstream dependencies. This adds up to a significant cost on larger programs, so I would strongly advise against this.

It also adds a cost in terms of extra dependencies, unless possibly the imports for those are also trimmed in a similar way, but pub would have to know to trim them as well.

It is much better to just keep the tests separate.

[mcmah309]

Even if that code is omitted reliably in the final program it does still add a parsing cost to all downstream dependencies. This adds up to a significant cost on larger programs, so I would strongly advise against this.

It also adds a cost in terms of extra dependencies, unless possibly the imports for those are also trimmed in a similar way, but pub would have to know to trim them as well.

It is much better to just keep the tests separate.

It's worth noting that in larger dynamic projects like applications, especially on teams, constant refactoring is inevitable. Trying to maintain two separate identical trees (src and test) is a development bottleneck. Ideally the project structure is well defined and rarely changes but that is not always true in practice. Also, it is often annoying to create a separate file/structure just to write a test, developers being lazy, will just not write tests for this reason 🤷. Finally, keeping the tests near the code can help explain what the code does faster. I'd happily take a few millisecond longer compilation for these benefits.

[munificent]

Related: Conditional attribute in C#.

[lrhn]

We can already do conditional compilation using if (const String.fromEnvironment("dart.config.os" == "windows")).
We'd just have to have the compiler add that information to the compilation environment. (We should, dart-lang/sdk#54785.)

We could allow "anything" to be conditional. I'm not sure it's going to make programs easier to read, or analyze using the analyzer or any other tool that doesn't actually have a designated configuration. We'd definitely need to ensure that all parts of a program are compiled in the same compilation configuration. If one class can conditionally have a member in its interface, and another can conditionally call that member, they better agree on which configuration they're compiled as.
(I don't think it'll give any power that we won't have today with configurable imports and parts, and constant if conditions. You can do pretty much anything with the imports, the only reason to add conditional parts is to have conditional augmentations, of privately named members, which need to be inside the same library. But then, augmentations aren't really needed except by macros.)

[lrhn]

I guess it could make visibleForTesting really mean "only exists when testing", if testing is a flag that the compiler can switch on.

[munificent]

We can already do conditional compilation using if (const String.fromEnvironment("dart.config.os" == "windows")).

That only works inside imperative code. There's no way to conditionally include or exclude an entire declaration, which is what the Rust thing and the C# Conditional attribute can do. C#'s attribute has even more power in that when a conditional method is excluded, all calls to it are silently discarded along with their argument list expressions. This is arguably too much magic, but it does make for a powerful, useful feature.

[lrhn]

Not sure it'll only be "a few milliseconds".
If your test code is inside lib/, then it's available to other packages. That means its dependencies must also be available, so every dev-dependency becomes a normal dependency.

That can increase the number of packages to solve for, and makes it more likely to get a version conflict when solving.

[lrhn]

That only works inside imperative code. There's no way to conditionally include or exclude an entire declaration,

Three will be with conditional parts and augmentations.

It's not as convenient as Rust's feature, but with conditional imports and parts, and constant condition expressions inside body code, you should be able to have both conditional code and conditional declarations.
(The only thing missing is conditional local declarations, and I think it should be possible to work around that.)

If we expect users to want to have large chunks of conditional code, we may want to make it more convenient to write. If it's just going to be a few more-level libraries, then I think the currently planned support will be enough.

[mcmah309]

If your test code is inside lib/, then it's available to other packages. That means its dependencies must also be available, so every dev-dependency becomes a normal dependency.

That can increase the number of packages to solve for, and makes it more likely to get a version conflict when solving.

Yes given the current Dart dependency system this is not ideal. A possible solution would be introducing a module system where test modules can be declared inside lib. e.g. inside lib

trimmed(string) => string.trim();

test {
  import 'package:test/test.dart';

  @test
  trimRemovesSurroundingWhitespace() {
    var string = '  foo '
    expect(trimmed(string), equals('foo'))
  }
}

Thus the parsing cost would essentially become nothing since all code inside a test { ... } would be ignored.

We could generalize this approach to work with more modules e.g. module "test" { ... }. Thus anything in module "not_the_current_module" { ... } would be ignored. Though I don't believe using an "integration_test" inside lib would be wise. Also since Dart already supports conditional export statements that makes a lot of the general uses of module mute.