rspec-halting: A general solution to Turing's Halting Problem implemented as an RSpec matcher

The Halting Problem is an (allegedly) unsolvable problem in computer science. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general-purpose algorithm for determining whether a program would eventually finish running or run forever could not exist.

This project implements an RSpec matcher that proves Turing wrong. You can use it today and it's as simple as:

expect {
  # Some complicated piece of code.
}.to halt

You might be skeptical of this claim. In the spirit of open-source software I've provide the full source to my algorithm here in this repository.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rspec-halting'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Don't actually use this, it's an April Fools' Day joke. That said, if you're using Rails you can just add it to your Gemfile in the :test group. If you're not using Rails you can add it to your Gemfile and then require it in your spec_helper.rb. Nothing else should be required.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/jarednorman/rspec-halting. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the rspec-halting project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.