Fixes

• Fixed unscoped messages after a passing fast-pathed assertion being lost.
• Fixed the help string for --order to mention random order as the default. (#3045)
• Fixed small documentation typos. (#3039)
• Fixed compilation with CATCH_CONFIG_THREAD_SAFE_ASSERTIONS for older C++ standards.
• Fixed a thread-safety issue with message macros being used too early after the process starts.
• Fixed automatic configuration to properly handle PlayStation platform. (#3054)
• Fixed the weird behaviour of section filtering when specifying multiple filters. (#3038)
  • See #3038 for more details.

Improvements

• Added lifetimebound attribute to various places.
  • As an example, compiler that supports lifetime analysis will now diagnose invalid use of Matcher combinators.
• Minor compile-time improvements to stringification. (#3028)
  • std::tuple printer does not recurse.
  • Some implementation details were outlined into the cpp file.
• Global variables will only be marked with thread_local in thread-safe builds. (#3044)

Miscellaneous

• The thread safety support is no longer experimental.
  • The new CMake option and C++ define is now CATCH_CONFIG_THREAD_SAFE_ASSERTIONS.

Fixes

• Fixed building on non-desktop GDK platforms (#3029)
• Fixed message macros being susceptible to race in specific scenario (#3031)
• Catch2's SEH filter will call the previously installed filter after reporting the error (#3033)

Improvements

• Handling of scoped messages (e.g. CAPTURE) is a bit faster.
• Better out-of-the-box support for QNX (#2953)
• Improved performance of assertions by up-to 10%
  • Release mode assertion fast-path sees the biggest improvement.
• Faster processing of non-escaped strings in --invisibles mode.
• Added support for Bazel's TEST_RANDOM_SEED env var (#3021)
• Added support for Bazel's TEST_PREMATURE_EXIT_FILE env var (#3020)
  • This creates a file that is deleted if the tests exit normally, but stays around if the process dies unexpectedly.
  • This functionality is also exposed through CLI as --premature-exit-guard-file

Miscellaneous

• Tuple.app has sponsored Catch2

Fixes

• pkg-config files will take DESTDIR env var into account when selecting install destination (#3006, #3019)
• Changed filter to store the provided predicate by value (#3002, #3005)
  • This is done to avoid dangling-by-default behaviour when filter is used inside GENERATE_COPY/GENERATE_REF.

Improvements

• Escaping XML and JSON output is faster when the strings do not need escaping.
  • The improvement starts at about 3x throughput, up to 10x for long strings.
• Message macros (INFO, CAPTURE, WARN, SUCCEED, etc) are now thread safe.

Fixes

• Fixed bad error reporting for multiple nested assertions (#1292)
• Fixed W4702 (unreachable code) in the polyfill for std::unreachable (#3007)
• Fixed decomposition of assertions comparing enum-backed bitfields (#3001)
• Fixed StringMaker specialization for time_point<system_clock> with non-default duration type (#2685)

Improvements

• Exceptions thrown during stringification of decomposed expression no longer fail the assertion (#2980)
• The selection logic for CATCH_TRAP prefers __builtin_debugtrap on all platforms when Catch2 is compiled with Clang

Improvements

• Added experimental opt-in support for thread safe assertions
  • Read the documentation for full details
• The default test run order has been changed to random
• Passing assertions are significantly faster when the reporter does not ask for assertionEnded events on passing assertions.
  • This is the default behaviour of e.g. Console or Compact reporter
  • Simple REQUIRE(true) is 60% faster in Release and 80% faster in Debug build configuration
  • Simple REQUIRE_NOTHROW is 230% faster in Release and 430% faster in Debug build configuration
  • Simple REQUIRE_THROWS is ~3% faster in Release and 20% faster in Debug build configuration (throwing introduces enough overhead that the optimizations inside Catch2 are mostly irrelevant)
• Small (2-5%) improvement if the reporter asks for assertionEnded events for passing assertions.
• The exit code constants are part of the Session API. (#2955, #2976)
• Suppressed unsigned integer overflow checking in locations with intended overflow (#2965)
• Reporters flush output after writing metadata, e.g. rng seed (#2964)
• Added unreachable after FAIL and SKIP macros (#2941)
  • This allows the compiler to understand that the execution does not continue past the macro, and avoids warnings.
• Added fast path for assertionStarting event when no reporter requires it
  • For backwards compatibility, this fast path is opt-in
  • A reporter can opt in by changing its ReporterPreferences::shouldReportAllAssertionStarts
• Improved last seen source location tracking to be more precise
  • This is used when reporting unexpected exceptions from tests

Fixes

• Fixed formatting of tags with more than 100 tests in the default --list-tags output (#2963)
• Fixed Clang-Tidy's readability-static-accessed-through-instance in tests
• Fixed most of Clang-Tidy's cppcoreguidelines-avoid-non-const-global-variables (#2582)
• The lifetime of scoped messages now strictly obeys their scope (#1759, #2019, #2959)
  • Previously Catch2 would try to keep them around during unexpected exception, to provide helpful context.
  • The amount of surprises the irregularities caused was not worth the occasional utility provided.
• TEMPLATE_TEST_CASE_SIG can handle signatures consisting of only types (#2680, #2995)
• Moved catch_test_run_info.hpp up from internal/ subfolder into the main one (#2972)

Miscellaneous

• pkg-config files are now generated at install time (#2979)
  • This fixes missing debug suffix in library names
  • This fixes install prefix mismatch between build config and actuall installation

Fixes

• Fixed bug where catch_discover_tests fails when no TEST_CASEs are present (#2962)
• Fixed Clang 19 -Wc++20-extensions warning (#2968)

Improvements

• Added std::initializer_list overloads for (Unordered)RangeEquals matcher (#2915, #2919)
• Added explicit casts to silence GCC's Wconversion (#2875)
• Made the use of builtin_constant_p tricks in assertion macros configurable (#2925)
  • It is used to prod GCC-like compilers into providing warnings for the asserted expressions, but the compilers miscompile it annoyingly often.
• Cleaned out Clang-Tidy's performance-enum-size warnings
• Added support for using from_range generator with iterators with value_type = const T (#2926)
  • This is not correct value_type typedef, but it is used in the wild and the change does not make the code meaningfully worse.

Fixes

• Fixed crash when stringifying pre-1970 (epoch) dates on Windows (#2944)

Miscellaneous

• Fixes and improvements for catch_discover_tests CMake helper
  • Removed redundant CTEST_FILE param when creating the indirection file for PRE_TEST discovery mode (#2936)
  • Rewrote the test discovery logic to use output from the JSON reporter
    • This means that catch_discover_tests now requires CMake 3.19 or newer
  • Added ADD_TAGS_AS_LABELS option. If specified, each CTest test will be labeled with corrensponding Catch2's test tag
• Bumped up the minimum required CMake version to build Catch2 to 3.16
• Meson build now provides option to avoid installing Catch2
• Bazel build is moved to Bzlmod.

Improvements

• Applied the JUnit reporter's optimization from last release to the SonarQube reporter
• Suppressed -Wuseless-cast in CHECK_THROWS_MATCHES (#2904)
• Standardize exit codes for various failures
  • Running no tests is now guaranteed to exit with 2 (without the --allow-running-no-tests flag)
  • All tests skipped is now always 4 (...)
  • Assertion failures are now always 42
  • and so on

Fixes

• Fixed out-of-bounds access when the arg parser encounters single - as an argument (#2905)

Miscellaneous

• Added catch_config_prefix_messages.hpp to meson build (#2903)
• catch_discover_tests now supports skipped tests (#2873)
  • You can get the old behaviour by calling catch_discover_tests with SKIP_IS_FAILURE option.

Improvements

• Slightly improved compile times of benchmarks
• Made the resolution estimation in benchmarks slightly more precise
• Added new test case macro, TEST_CASE_PERSISTENT_FIXTURE (#2885, #1602)
  • Unlike TEST_CASE_METHOD, the same underlying instance is used for all partial runs of that test case
• MASSIVELY improved performance of the JUnit reporter when handling successful assertions (#2897)
  • For 1 test case and 10M assertions, the new reporter runs 3x faster and uses up only 8 MB of memory, while the old one needs 7 GB of memory.
• Reworked how output redirects works.
  • Combining a reporter writing to stdout with capturing reporter no longer leads to the capturing reporter seeing all of the other reporter's output.
  • The file based redirect no longer opens up a new temporary file for each partial test case run, so it will not run out of temporary files when running many tests in single process.

Miscellaneous

• Better documentation for matchers on thrown exceptions (REQUIRE_THROWS_MATCHES)
• Improved catch_discover_tests's handling of environment paths (#2878)
  • It won't reorder paths in DL_PATHS or DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATHS args
  • It won't overwrite the environment paths for test discovery

Fixes

• Fixed Windows ARM64 build by fixing the preprocessor condition guarding use _umul128 intrinsic.
• Fixed Windows ARM64EC build by removing intrinsic pragma it does not understand. (#2858)
  • Why doesn't the x64-emulation build mode understand x64 pragmas? Don't ask me, ask the MSVC guys.
• Fixed the JUnit reporter sometimes crashing when reporting a fatal error. (#1210, #2855)
  • The binary will still exit, but through the original error, rather than secondary error inside the reporter.
  • The underlying fix applies to all reporters, not just the JUnit one, but only JUnit was currently causing troubles.

Improvements

• Disable -Wnon-virtual-dtor in Decomposer and Matchers (#2854)
• precision in floating point stringmakers defaults to max_digits10.
  • This means that floating point values will be printed with enough precision to disambiguate any two floats.
• Column wrapping ignores ansi colour codes when calculating string width (#2833, #2849)
  • This makes the output much more readable when the provided messages contain colour codes.

Miscellaneous

• Conan support improvements
  • compatibility_cppstr is set to False. (#2860)
    • This means that Conan won't let you mix library and project with different C++ standard settings.
  • The implementation library CMake target name through Conan is properly set to Catch2::Catch2 (#2861)
• SelfTest target can be built through Bazel (#2857)