hypothesis.works articles: Compositional shrinking

In my last article about shrinking, I discussed the problems with basing shrinking on the type of the values to be shrunk.

In writing it though I forgot that there was a halfway house which is also somewhat bad (but significantly less so) that you see in a couple of implementations.

This is when the shrinking is not type based, but still follows the classic shrinking API that takes a value and returns a lazy list of shrinks of that value. Examples of libraries that do this are theft and QuickTheories.

This works reasonably well and solves the major problems with type directed shrinking, but it’s still somewhat fragile and importantly does not compose nearly as well as the approaches that Hypothesis or test.check take.

Ideally, as well as not being based on the types of the values being generated, shrinking should not be based on the actual values generated at all.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but it actually works pretty well.