Etna: An evaluation platform for property-based testing

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.

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Publication Details

Journal
Journal of Functional Programming
Published
2026-09-15
DOI
https://doi.org/10.46298/jfp.17867
Primary Topic
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Etna: An evaluation platform for property-based testing

Nikhil Kamath, A. Keleş, Ceren Mert, Jessica Shi et al.
Journal of Functional Programming
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
article

Etna: An evaluation platform for property-based testing

Nikhil Kamath, A. Keleş, Ceren Mert, Jessica Shi, Leonidas Lampropoulos, Harrison Goldstein, Tin Nam Liu, Benjamin C. Pierce
article en

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.

Journal of Functional ProgrammingVol. Volume 36
University of Maryland, College Park (US)
National Science Foundation
Openalex Percentile: Top 72%
Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
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Etna: An evaluation platform for property-based testing — Nikhil Kamath, A. Keleş, et al. · Journal of Functional Programming (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS