{"id":5802,"date":"2021-03-15T07:00:48","date_gmt":"2021-03-15T14:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writeasync.net\/?p=5802"},"modified":"2021-03-13T21:31:23","modified_gmt":"2021-03-14T05:31:23","slug":"out-with-the-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/writeasync.net\/?p=5802","title":{"rendered":"Letter Boxed: out with the old"},"content":{"rendered":"

Software rot<\/a> is inevitable if projects are not maintained with care. It is nice to think that in today’s write once, run anywhere<\/a> world, a rock-solid application with no planned changes can continue to work perhaps without even recompiling<\/a>; of course, reality is a lot more complex. Frameworks are updated (hello, .NET 5<\/a>!), new libraries are released, and you never know when a security vulnerability will require an immediate patch and redeploy<\/a> regardless of how stable your own code is. To that end, let’s revisit the Letter Boxed codebase<\/a> and update it for the new decade (already in progress).<\/p>\n

First order of business: upgrade to .NET 5.0!<\/strong> Two years ago, .NET Core 2.2<\/a> was the latest and greatest. Needless to say, a lot has happened in the .NET world since then<\/a>. Luckily, compatibility is a strong focus<\/a> for every .NET release. In this case, I encountered no major issues in the upgrade — it was almost<\/em> as simple as changing the <TargetFramework><\/code> in each .csproj file: [see commit on GitHub]<\/a><\/p>\n

Next up: use CMake instead of .vcxproj files!<\/strong> As you may recall, I wrote a series of posts to show how to leverage CMake for native app development of a cross-platform project<\/a>. While cross-platform is not a primary focus here, the simplicity that CMake brings combined with relatively good Visual Studio support is a boon for development. This change was significantly more involved, since I opted to concurrently migrate to GTest for better CMake integration. However, I hope you’ll agree that the result is quite a bit better than carrying around .sln and .vcxproj files: [see commit on GitHub]<\/a><\/p>\n

On to the next improvement: slngen + traversal projects!<\/strong> Checked in solution files are pass\u00e9. It’s easy to generate a solution file with slngen<\/a> given a set of dirs.proj<\/code> traversal projects using the corresponding MSBuild SDK<\/a>. Even though I added several files (including global.json<\/a>), I achieved net negative lines after removing the .sln: [see commit on GitHub]<\/a><\/p>\n

Embrace central package versioning!<\/strong> Did you know that the .NET SDK now supports central package versioning<\/a> out of the box? I didn’t either until I saw a tutorial<\/a> from Stuart Lang<\/a>. Previously I had only been aware of the add-on SDK<\/a> for the same, but I’ll gladly take a simpler built-in solution: [see commit on GitHub]<\/a><\/p>\n

Upgrade all the packages!<\/strong> With our new central registry of packages, it’s simple to do a comprehensive upgrade in one localized change: [see commit on GitHub]<\/a><\/p>\n

Unify the output directory!<\/strong> In my earlier exploration of CMake + .NET interop<\/a>, I showed how to ensure the .NET and native artifacts landed in the same output root (effectively achieving a read-only source tree<\/a>). This time there was a small complication because of the BenchmarkDotNet<\/a> projects; normally, these would generate customized benchmark projects at runtime and build them with the .NET SDK, but this causes issues<\/a> with a heavily customized output path. Luckily there is an [InProcess]<\/code><\/a> job option to completely bypass the external compile\/run step which got things working perfectly: [see commit on GitHub]<\/a><\/p>\n

Finally, enhance the command line experience!<\/strong> Again, drawing from the CMake saga<\/a>, I added a build.cmd script to automate the build steps for both C++ and .NET, all from the comfort of the command line: [see commit on GitHub]<\/a><\/p>\n

As a final note, I have a new computer which means I need to reestablish the benchmark baselines. Let’s run build release<\/code> and execute the managed and native Letter Boxed solvers for old time’s sake:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
Puzzle<\/th>\n.NET Core Solver<\/th>\nC++ Solver<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
RME
WCL<\/br>TGK
API<\/th>\n		\n
\r\n[000.000] Loading trie...\r\n[000.052] Loaded 162309 words.\r\n[000.053] Finding valid words...\r\n[000.059] Found 754 valid words.\r\n[000.059] Finding solutions...\r\nMARKETPLACE-EARWIG\r\nWIGWAM-MARKETPLACE\r\nPRAGMATIC-CAKEWALK\r\n[000.065] Done.\r\n<\/pre>\n<\/td>\n
\n
\r\n[000.000] Loading trie...\r\n[000.044] Loaded 162309 words.\r\n[000.044] Finding valid words...\r\n[000.048] Found 754 valid words.\r\n[000.048] Finding solutions...\r\nMARKETPLACE-EARWIG\r\nWIGWAM-MARKETPLACE\r\nPRAGMATIC-CAKEWALK\r\n[000.050] Done.\r\n<\/pre>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
ERG
BID
NCF
TAO<\/th>\n		\n
\r\n[000.000] Loading trie...\r\n[000.052] Loaded 162309 words.\r\n[000.052] Finding valid words...\r\n[000.059] Found 1436 valid words.\r\n[000.060] Finding solutions...\r\nROBAND-DEFECTING\r\n -- snipped 72 other solutions --\r\nOBTECTED-DRAFTING\r\n[000.095] Done.\r\n<\/pre>\n<\/td>\n
\n
\r\n[000.000] Loading trie...\r\n[000.045] Loaded 162309 words.\r\n[000.045] Finding valid words...\r\n[000.050] Found 1436 valid words.\r\n[000.050] Finding solutions...\r\nBAITED-DEFORCING\r\n -- snipped 72 other solutions --\r\nOBTECTED-DRAFTING\r\n[000.080] Done.\r\n<\/pre>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n
As expected, we see a nice improvement over the previous results<\/a> thanks to Moore’s Law<\/a> (and perhaps the steady improvement of the .NET runtime<\/a>). Whew! Nothing like a good spring cleaning to revitalize a “legacy” project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Software rot is inevitable if projects are not maintained with care. It is nice to think that in today’s write once, run anywhere world, a rock-solid application with no planned changes can continue to work perhaps without even recompiling; of… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,105,102,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cross-platform","category-games","category-legacy","category-scripts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/writeasync.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/writeasync.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/writeasync.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writeasync.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writeasync.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5802"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/writeasync.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5807,"href":"http:\/\/writeasync.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5802\/revisions\/5807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/writeasync.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writeasync.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/writeasync.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}