why swift testing is better than XCTest?

Asked on 2025-07-10

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Swift Testing offers several advantages over XCTest, making it a more modern and efficient choice for testing Swift code. Here are some key reasons why Swift Testing is considered better:

  1. Parallel Testing: Swift Testing runs test functions in parallel by default, which reduces execution time and is crucial for continuous integration (CI) environments. In contrast, XCTest only supports parallelization using multiple processes, each running one test at a time. This parallel execution helps in faster turnaround and exposes hidden dependencies between tests (Go further with Swift Testing).

  2. Simplified Assertions: Swift Testing uses two basic macros, expect and require, instead of the many specialized functions in XCTest. This allows for more straightforward and expressive test writing using ordinary expressions and language operators (Meet Swift Testing).

  3. Concurrency and Traits: Swift Testing is designed to work with Swift concurrency and supports traits for specifying information per test or suite. This makes it more flexible and integrated with modern Swift features (Meet Swift Testing).

  4. Cross-Platform Consistency: Swift Testing has a common codebase across all platforms, ensuring consistent behavior when moving between platforms. This is a significant improvement over XCTest, which had multiple implementations (Meet Swift Testing).

  5. Open Source and Community Driven: Swift Testing is open source and has an open feature proposal process, allowing the community to contribute to its evolution. This openness encourages community involvement and continuous improvement (Meet Swift Testing).

  6. Integration with Modern Tools: Swift Testing is integrated into major tools and IDEs in the Swift ecosystem, including Xcode and Visual Studio Code, making it accessible and easy to use for developers (Platforms State of the Union).

These features make Swift Testing a more powerful, flexible, and efficient testing framework compared to XCTest, especially for projects that leverage modern Swift features and require cross-platform consistency.