Protest is a unit test framework for C++ unit test framework that distinguishes itself by having a single all-covering check/assert and deals with fixtures in an extremely slick way. I recommend that you check it out.
A few month ago I implemented stringification in Protest and I also wrote functions that stringifies all the classes in STL, std::vector, etc. This feature added some value to Protest but it also caused the compilation times to increase dramatically. The test suite of Protest ran in 2.5 minutes before this feature, and almost 4 minutes afterwards. What happened?
Well, what happened was #include-ing every possible header of STL. So how to fix it? Don't include every header of STL? Exactly.
But then the code won't compile as the used classes, e.g., std::vector, isn't declared. To get around this issue I did something really ugly... By surrounding the relevant code with #if/#endif, the stringification function for std::vector is only compiled if the vector header has been included by the client code. This is done by checking if the include guard used by vector is defined.
When this was implemented the test suite of Protest again finished in around 2.5 minutes.
Of course, this has to be done for each supported compiler, but that's a small price to pay considering ~40% less time spent on waiting for your test suite to compile. Actually, I haven't ported this to MSVC yet.
On a more philosophical note, how this feature was added without cost says a lot about Protest -- it questions the status quo, complexity, and lack of features in other C++ testing frameworks. Protest tries to improve.
