{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/mica-automated-differential-testing-for-ocaml","title":"Mica: Automated Differential Testing for OCaml Modules","arxiv_id":"2408.14561","date":"2024-08-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ernest Ng","Harrison Goldstein","Benjamin C. Pierce"],"abstract":"Suppose we are given two OCaml modules implementing the same signature. How do we check that they are observationally equivalent -- that is, that they behave the same on all inputs? One established technique is to use a property-based testing (PBT) tool such as QuickCheck. Currently, however, this can require significant amounts of boilerplate code and ad-hoc test harnesses. To address this issue, we present Mica, an automated tool for testing observational equivalence of OCaml modules. Mica is implemented as a PPX compiler extension, allowing users to supply minimal annotations to a module signature. These annotations guide Mica to automatically derive specialized PBT code that checks observational equivalence. We discuss the design of Mica and demonstrate its efficacy as a testing tool on various modules taken from real-world OCaml libraries.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14561v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.14561v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"mica-automated-differential-testing-for-ocaml","repo_url":"https://github.com/ngernest/mica","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}