Reported on Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5697159/testing-for-error-calls-in-hunit

With optimizations on, the following program, which normally succeeds (correctly generating an exception), instead fails, and the exception is optimized away.

import Control.Exception
import Test.HUnit

throwIfNegative :: Int -> String
throwIfNegative n | n < 0     = error "negative"
                  | otherwise = "no worries"
{-# NOINLINE throwIfNegative #-}

case_negative =
    handleJust errorCalls (const $ return ()) $ do
        evaluate $ throwIfNegative (-1)
        assertFailure "must throw when given a negative number"
  where errorCalls (ErrorCall _) = Just ()

main = runTestTT $ TestCase case_negative

Looking at the core, after a few iterations, the call to throwIfNegative is dropped as dead code.

Using seq instead of evaluate is happy enough:

case_negative =
    handleJust errorCalls (const $ return ()) $ do
        throwIfNegative (-1) `seq` assertFailure "must throw when given a negative number"
  where errorCalls (ErrorCall _) = Just ()

or a bang pattern:

case_negative =
    handleJust errorCalls (const $ return ()) $ do
        let !x = throwIfNegative (-1)
        assertFailure "must throw when given a negative number"
  where errorCalls (ErrorCall _) = Just ()

Possibly related to #2273