We’re down to 22,906 errors now. The errors are getting a little harder to smash, but we’re crushing them into tiny little bits nonetheless.
Category Archives: C#
VS2005 Regular Expression Search Rules!
One of the things I had to do to eliminate a few thousand bugs as part of this C++ to C# conversion is replace the text transmission functions.
Nevermind how they work internally, the important thing for the sake of the current conversion is that they look completely different.
The old functions looked something like:
send_to_char( “Words.\n\r”, ch );
While the new functions are supposed to look like:
ch.SendText( “Words.” );
With around 4000 or so calls to that function, it would be a dauntingly huge project to retype every reference to send_to_char. Because it’s a bit more complicated than a simple word replace, we would be hosed if not for Visual Studio 2005’s regular expression search and replace.
If you Google regular expression search-and-replace, most likely you’ll come up with a lot of people complaining about it. Ignore them — those people are whiny idiots. It is easily one of the most useful things ever added to Visual Studio and it takes about 10-15 minutes to get the hang of.
To make the above change, all I had to do was do a search for:
send_to_char[(] {:q}, {:i} [)];
And replace it with:
\2.SendText( \1 );
As a basic explanation:
1. Anything in [] brackets means “any of these characters”. I had to bracket the parenthesis to keep the parser from evaluating them as an expression.
2. Anything in {} brackets means that it’s assigned an “expression tag”. It’s the equivalent of the scripting language act of assigning it to %0, %1, etc and they’re numbered in the order they are found.
3. :q means match a “quoted expression”.
4. :i means match a C++/C# identifier (i.e. a variable name).
5. \1 means “insert the first tagged expression”. \2 inserts the second, etc.
This is enough to get the basic idea going, and it works like a charm, provided the functions are spaced EXACTLY as indicated. If you have something like (notice spaces):
send_to_char(“Something” , ch );
It will not work. In any codebase that has had more than one person’s fingers in it, you’ll have inconsistent spacing. Some people will put spaces before/after every variable, some won’t, and some will be mixed. That’s why we have to set it to ignore spaces anywhere they will be a concern. We do this by inserting [ ]* which means “match anywhere from 0 to infinity spaces”. The search expression now looks like:
send_to_char[(][ ]*{:q},[ ]*{:i}[ ]*[)];
And now that I’ve figured out how to use regular expressions, all of the references to the Diku send_to_char function have been replaced with our shiny new code.
The error count is now down to 24,414.
Skwish Skwish Skwish Go The Bugs
Now we’re down to 30,975. Nothing interesting is happening, but we’re making progress.
Most of these errors are related to one of four things:
1) References to functions moved into classes have to be changed.
2) Pointer-based functions and comparisons that need to be rewritten to be reference-based.
3) Public vs. private data.
4) Different handling of arrays in C#.
The majority are #2, with a large quantity of each of the others. When you have 30,000+ bugs to fix, everyone gets their share.
Just Past Halfway
The compiler tells me:
“You have just passed the halfway point in the journey toward your next codebase.”
Errors are now quite a bit less thant the halfway mark (which would be 37,571).
We now have 35, 542 errors to resolve. We’re making pretty good progress so far.
Under 40,000
We’re down to 39,610 errors now. Even though that’s a stunningly huge amount, it’s still progress.
My brain’s starting to hurt, I should probably work on a different project for a few days.
Significant Progress
We’re down to 44,773 errors. That’s 12,486 fixed for today.
Visual Studio 2005 has become noticeably more responsive. It’s still a little slow and clunky, but each error corrected is a slight speed increase.
Final Total For The Day
17,883 errors squashed.
I doubt I will break that record anytime soon. I deserve a cookie. Too bad I don’t have any.
New Personal Error Correction Record
Yesterday I mentioned that I had 75,142 second-pass compile errors in the codebase. That’s a lot no matter how you describe it.
Aside from spending a couple hours reading Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100, all I’ve really done today is hammer away at the code trying to reduce that number. This has been a little slow because Visual Studio 2005 slows down A LOT when it has to store tens of thousands of error messages in memory and check every change you make to code against those errors to see whether it can remove them from the error list.
I really like intellisense and realtime error checking, but not when it pretty much causes the IDE to grind to a halt. As the number of errors decreases, VS is gradually becoming more responsive, but it’s still too much of a mess to be a very pleasant editing experience.
So, the number of errors is now 58,264. That’s still a ton, but I’ve now set a new personal record of fixing 16,878 compile errors in a single day. My previous record was about 8500, basically due to some weird recursive STL/templating issues with a C++ app I was writing a year or two ago.
Even better, the day’s still not completely over yet, so I could probably add a few more to that total.
I Broke The Compiler
Seriously.
I cleared up all the first-pass compiler errors (the remaining 1,447). It was tedious, but not too terrible. That means that the compiler made it to the second pass.
It churned away for a while, and then gave me a “build failed message”, which I expected. It then proceeded to show me every last little error that it could find.
There were seventy five thousand one hundred and forty-two errors.
After displaying that many errors, Visual Studio 2005 promptly crashed in a horrible flaming fireball of death.
There are only 116,000 lines of code in the whole codebase. That means two-thirds of the code is broken. Nice, eh? I wonder how long it will take me to fix 75k errors…
1,447 Errors
That’s a good thing. Down from 7,899 errors. Everything that could be fixed via search-and-replace (about 5,000 errors) has been, and the rest (about 1,400) have been edited by hand. There’s still a lot more work to do in stage 2, but the number of compile errors is steadily decreasing. Soon we will have a C# version.
C#: Stage 1 of 5 Complete
Stage 1 is done.
Q: What is stage one?
A: Hammering the code into C# syntax so that Visual Studio gives no complaint before trying to compile to code.
Q: What’s that involve?
A: Placing all of the functions into classes, eliminating all global variables, converting #define statements into variables (in the case of constants) or class methods (in the case of macros), changing all char[x] variable declarations to strings, rephrasing all array declaration and initialization, and removing stray const keywords.
Q: How many changes did you have to make?
A: I had to change about 4,000 lines of code, mostly by hand. I love search-and-replace, but it couldn’t do much here.
Q: Did you completely break the heck out of anything in the process.
A: ABSOLUTELY! I know for a fact that I will have to completely rewrite mob tracking (which has always been one of the things I intended to do anyhow). Some of the changes to correct syntax also just pushed the errors later in the process — they won’t show up in a syntax check and will instead show up in a compile.
Q: What are the other 4 stages of this conversion?
2 = Compiling without errors. This is a huge step. After just running the first initial build, there were 7,899 compile errors. A large percentage of these will be pointer errors because I didn’t change any pointer-based code (“Pointers and fixed size buffers may only be used in an unsafe context.”)
3 = Building an executable. This may be moderately complex, but since C# pushes so much of the work onto the syntax checker and compiler, chances are that if it compiles without errors then the program will build and run.
4 = Booting without immediate crashes. This will involve firing up the debugger and making sure that all of the changes didn’t have any unintended consequences. They will, errors are unavoidable in a rewrite of this magnitude. Hopefully debugging will be fairly quick.
5 = Logging a character in and walking around without crashes. Most of the code lies dormant until a player is logged in. This includes things like network code, combat routines, hit/mana/move regen, informational screens, skills, etc.
Completing all of this will get us ready to put up an alpha port of the game so that we can actively start building content.
Global Domination
Or more like, “getting owned by globals”.
As part of the conversion to C++ one of the major tasks is moving all of the global functions into classes. There are a lot of them – each spell, command, skill, bard song, et cetera has been handled by a global in the past. Even with all that’s been moved, I still count 1,467 global functions that need to be moved into classes. This is down from about 2,000 when I started.
Some of this is easy. It’s obvious that a get_object_weight function belongs to the object classs and an initialize_mob function belongs to the mobile class. Other things might not be so easy, like functions that belong to both characters and objects like give_object_to_char. It could just as easily belong to either one. It’s not a big deal if I just make an arbitrary decision and stick it somewhere, but it is something that I have to think about.
