Generating test data without using @given decorator about hypothesis

[tybug]

just to answer a concrete question....example() in your case is slow because it is generating and caching 100 examples ahead of time, not just one:

hypothesis/hypothesis-python/src/hypothesis/strategies/_internal/strategies.py

Lines 327 to 340 in 226268c

	@settings(
	database=None,
	max_examples=100,
	deadline=None,
	verbosity=Verbosity.quiet,
	phases=(Phase.generate,),
	suppress_health_check=list(HealthCheck),
	)
	def example_generating_inner_function(ex):
	self.__examples.append(ex)
	example_generating_inner_function()
	shuffle(self.__examples)
	return self.__examples.pop()

[Zac-HD]

@given() is the only way to draw data from strategies - the .example() method just wraps that up for you internally! Supporting meaningfully different interfaces just isn't technically feasible with our limited volunteer time 🙁

For determinism and number of examples, you'll want to use @settings(max_examples=..., derandomize=True).

It's slower than plain random.randint() because we're doing much more under the hood which is useful in testing. If your data is simple that's probably a poor tradeoff; if it's complex then the convenient API probably wins out and the performance gap will be smaller.

Finally, I'll note that Hypothesis' data is draw from a really weird distribution, full of edge cases and weird correlations. That's great for finding bugs, but may or may not be what you want here - if not, I've heard good things about the mimesis library for non-testing usecases (but not used it myself). I hope that helps!

[karlicoss]

Thanks for such a quick response, this helps!