[kernelbandwidth]

Assertions don't actually have to kill the program. They send an abort signal, which means you can catch them with a signal handler.

I similarly wrote a simple C testing framework for a little project I was working on, based on assertions. The framework uses signal handlers for aborts and segfaults, and then setjmp/longjmp to handle resuming the test suite at the next test case. This has the particularly nice effect of turning segfaults into (marked as such) test failures, instead of just terminating everything. It probably wouldn't be too hard to fit custom messages in too, but I hadn't felt the need yet.

[simias]

I concede that being able to handle segfaults as test failure is a very nice feature, however dealing with signal handlers is a bit more involved that simply using return values and I believe that it might cause portability issues (does it work on Windows for instance?).

I agree that for a decent test framework it might be the best approach but I think at this point we're no longer talking about "a minimal unit testing framework" which was the point of TFA.

[marmaduke]

It would be safer to fork before the segfault, to preclude other less obvious memory errors.