X-Git-Url: https://jxself.org/git/?p=open-adventure.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=notes.adoc;h=884d1ce7f7d5ff970e2ca331687afe5e17cffe67;hp=cc4246c440abadd0b4b0605988261214a9e2ba3a;hb=f815299a2a97656b0f4ea0793c2207c2437888f6;hpb=60126c3dac4788cd5c01f5da6bb50986aeaac0d3

diff --git a/notes.adoc b/notes.adoc
index cc4246c..884d1ce 100644
--- a/notes.adoc
+++ b/notes.adoc
@@ -11,7 +11,8 @@ The principal maintainers of this code are Eric S. Raymond and Jason
 Ninneman.  Eric received Don Woods's encouragement to update and ship
 the game; Jason signed on early in the process to help. The assistance
 of Peje Nilsson in restructuring some particularly grotty gotos is
-gratefully acknowledged.
+gratefully acknowledged. Petr Voropaev contributed fuzz testing. Aaron
+Traas did a lot of painstaking work to improve test coverage.
 
 == Nomenclature ==
 
@@ -60,11 +61,11 @@ Using "seed" and -l, the distribution now includes a regression-test
 suite for the game.  Any log captured with -l (and thus containing
 a "seed" command) will replay reliably, including random events.
 
-The adventure.text file is no longer required at runtime.  Instead, it
-is compiled at build time to a source module containing C structures,
-which is then linked to the advent binary. There is an adventure.yaml file
-as well; this is also compiled to C code, and will eventually replace
-adventure.text altogether.
+The adventure.text file is no longer required at runtime.  Instead, an
+adventure.yaml file is compiled at build time to a source module
+containing C structures, which is then linked to the advent
+binary.  The YAML is drastically easier to read and edit than
+the old ad-hoc format of adventure.txt.
 
 The game-save format has changed.  This was done to simplify the
 FORTRAN-derived code that formerly implemented the save/restore
@@ -73,6 +74,9 @@ necessarily pretty ugly by modern standards. Encryption and
 checksumming have been discarded - it's pointless to try
 tamper-proofing saves when everyone has the source code.
 
+A -r command-line been added. When it is given (with a file path
+argument) it is functionally equivalent to a RESTORE command.
+
 == Translation ==
 
 The 2.5 code was a mechanical C translation of a FORTRAN original.
@@ -82,14 +86,18 @@ ugly and quite unreadable.
 Jason Ninneman and I have moved it to what is almost, but not quite,
 idiomatic modern C.  We refactored the right way, checking correctness
 against a comprehensive test suite that we built first and verified
-with coverage tools (we have 88% coverage, with the remaining 12%
-confined to exception cases that are difficult to reach). This is
+with coverage tools (we now have over 95% coverage, with the remaining
+confined to exception cases that are very difficult to reach). This is
 what you are running when you do "make check".
 
-This move entailed some structural changes.  The most important was
-the refactoring of over 350 gotos into if/loop/break structures.  We
-also abolished almost all shared globals; the main one left is a
-struct holding the game's saveable/restorable state.
+In the process we found and fixed a few minor bugs. Most notably, reading
+the relocated Witt's End sign in the endgame didn't work. Behavior when
+saying the giant's magic words outside his room wasn't quite right either.
+
+The move to modern C entailed some structural changes.  The most
+important was the refactoring of over 350 gotos into if/loop/break
+structures.  We also abolished almost all shared globals; the main one
+left is a struct holding the game's saveable/restorable state.
 
 The original code was greatly complicated by a kind of bit-packing
 that was performed because the FORTRAN it was written in had no string
@@ -100,10 +108,15 @@ of sixbit code points in a restricted character set, packed 5 to a
 verb was one of these words, and what would be string operations in a
 more recent language were all done on sequences of these words.
 
-We are still in the process of removing all this bit-packing cruft
-in favor of proper C strings.  C strings may be a weak and leaky
-abstraction, but this is one of the rare cases in which they are
-an obvious improvement over what they're displacing... 
+We have removed all this bit-packing cruft in favor of proper C
+strings.  C strings may be a weak and leaky abstraction, but this is
+one of the rare cases in which they are an obvious improvement over
+what they're displacing...
+
+We have also conducted extensive fuzz testing on the game using
+afl (American Fuzzy Lop).  We've found and fixed some crashers in
+our new code (which occasionally uses malloc(3)), but none as yet
+in Don's old code (which didn't).
 
 The code falls short of being fully modern C in the following
 ways:
@@ -113,9 +126,10 @@ ways:
   We don't need whatever minor performance gains this might collect,
   and the choice to refrain will make forward translation into future
   languages easier.
-* There are a few gotos left that resist restructuring; all of these
-  are in the principal command interpreter function implementing its
-  state machine.
+
+* There are a few gotos left that resist restructuring; all are in the
+  principal command interpreter function implementing its state
+  machine.
 
 * Linked lists (for objects at a location) are implemented using an array
   of link indices. This is a surviving FORTRANism that is quite unlike
@@ -123,13 +137,18 @@ ways:
   to fix it because doing so would (a) be quite difficult, and (b)
   compromise forward-portability to other languages.
 
-* The code still has an unfortunately high density of magic numbers - in
-  particular, numeric object and room IDs.  There are plans to fix this.
-
-* Much of the code still uses FORTRAN-style uppercase names.
+* Much of the code still assumes one-origin array indexing.  Thus,
+  arrays are a cell larger than they strictly need to be and cell 0 is
+  unused.
 
 * The code is still mostly typeless, slinging around machine longs
   like a FORTRAN or BCPL program.  Some (incomplete) effort has been made
   to introduce semantic types.
 
+We have made exactly one minor architectural change.  In addition to the
+old code's per-object state-description messages, we now have a per-object
+message series for state *changes*.  This makes it possible to pull a fair
+amount of test out of the arbitrary-messages list and associate those
+mesages with the objects that conceptually own them.
+
 // end