Development

If you intend to contribute to Stechec2 or if you want to write your own game, here are useful tricks to ease your task. As a general note: you may be interested in taking look at the help message (./waf.py --help) to discover commands and options.

Now most importantly, add the --enable-debug option to the configure command so that Stechec2 is built with debugging information. This will enable you to run Stechec2 under GDB or any other debugger.

Using Clang

If you prefer Clang over GCC (for error messages, for instance), you can configure Stechec2 the following way (assuming you properly installed Clang++):

CXX=clang++ ./waf.py configure --with-games=...

Then build the project as usual.

Code coverage

Code coverage is basically the answer to “what part of the code is really executed?”. It is particularly useful in the context of a testsuite. When some code is not covered (i.e. never executed), two conclusions can be drawed:

• either your testsuite misses testcases;
• either you have code that is useless… and thus that uselessly complexifies your codebase.

In order to compute code coverage reports, you have to configure Stechec2 with the --enable-gcov option. Then build Stechec2 as usual, execute it somehow (for instance running the testsuite) and then generate the report with the coverage command:

./waf.py configure --with-games=... --enable-gcov
./waf.py build --check # Build and run the testsuite
./waf.py coverage

At this point, you can open the build/gcov-report.html file in your favorite browser and discover what parts of your code are not tested/useless!

Note that code coverage does not work very well when using another compiler than G++. There exists llvm-cov, but our report formatter, gcovr mysteriously crashes when attempting to use it. So please use G++ when you want to compute code coverage. :-)

Address sanitizer

GCC or LLVM’s address sanitizer is as useful as Valgrind when programming with manual memory management (such as in C or C++) to detect various memory issues. Using this feature is very easy in Stechec2: just use the --enable-asan configure option. ASAN will output messages on Stechec2’s standard error output if it detects any issue. Note that when this happens in our testsuite, the corresponding testcases fail (which is good! such issues must be fixed!).