# Deprecations and incoming changes This page documents current deprecations and upcoming planned changes inside Catch2. The difference between these is that a deprecated feature will be removed, while a planned change to a feature means that the feature will behave differently, but will still be present. Obviously, either of these is a breaking change, and thus will not happen until at least the next major release. ## Deprecations ### Secondary description amongst tags Currently, the tags part of `TEST_CASE` (and others) macro can also contain text that is not part of tags. This text is then separated into a "description" of the test case, but the description is then never used apart from writing it out for `--list-tests -v high`. Because it isn't actually used nor documented, and brings complications to Catch2's internals, description support will be removed. ### SourceLineInfo::empty() There should be no reason to ever have an empty `SourceLineInfo`, so the method will be removed. ## Planned changes ### Output format of `--list-*` command line parameters The various list operations will be piped through reporters. This means that e.g. XML reporter will write the output as machine-parseable XML, while the Console reporter will keep the current, human-oriented output. ### `CHECKED_IF` and `CHECKED_ELSE` To make the `CHECKED_IF` and `CHECKED_ELSE` macros more useful, they will be marked as "OK to fail" (`Catch::ResultDisposition::SuppressFail` flag will be added), which means that their failure will not fail the test, making the `else` actually useful. ### Change semantics of `[.]` and tag exclusion Currently, given these 2 tests ```cpp TEST_CASE("A", "[.][foo]") {} TEST_CASE("B", "[.][bar]") {} ``` specifying `[foo]` as the testspec will run test "A" and specifying `~[foo]` will run test "B", even though it is hidden. Also, specifying `~[baz]` will run both tests. This behaviour is often surprising and will be changed so that hidden tests are included in a run only if they positively match a testspec. ### Console Colour API The API for Catch2's console colour will be changed to take an extra argument, the stream to which the colour code should be applied. ### Type erasure in the `PredicateMatcher` Currently, the `PredicateMatcher` uses `std::function` for type erasure, so that type of the matcher is always `PredicateMatcher`, regardless of the type of the predicate. Because of the high compilation overhead of `std::function`, and the fact that the type erasure is used only rarely, `PredicateMatcher` will no longer be type erased in the future. Instead, the predicate type will be made part of the PredicateMatcher's type. --- [Home](Readme.md#top)