Automated testing of packages created using rstantools

Developers
1

Hi,

I am using testthat for unit tests of a package interfacing with rstan and covr to measure test coverage. It is very hard to achieve > 95% coverage because the automatically generated C++ file src/stanExports_lgp.h has

} catch (const std::exception& e) 
    stan::lang::rethrow_located(e, current_statement_begin__, prog_reader__());	
    // Next line prevents compiler griping about no return
    throw std::runtime_error("*** IF YOU SEE THIS, PLEASE REPORT A BUG ***");	
}

in so many places, and those lines will never be reached when calling sampling or optimizing for the
stan model. Is there any way to improve coverage?

2

My current practice for testing Stan code is to run rstan::sampling for just a few iterations, so that it doesn’t take long, and to do that inside suppressWarnings because I know that there will be a warning about low Rhat etc. If someone knows a better way then I am happy to hear. Also I test the functions defined in functions block separately by calling them from R.

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3

It should be possible to specify the functions to be excluded by covr, although the documentation only refers to R functions, so that may not work over C/C++ headers.

Another option is to add some exclusion comments to the src/stanExports.lgp.h (I assume this is under your control), but again I don’t have direct experience whether it would work.

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