ipochto
commented
2 years ago Hi. Yep, you are right. There is a lot of legacy code from times when wargus/staratagus was wrote on pure C. But it works mostly. In a situation of lack of resources (mainly time, and developers of course)... imho the polishing of code while there is another issues/improvements which must to be fixed to make stratagus realy playable is not really rational )
For example speaking of std::shared_ptr: There is a mechanism of refs - every unit has ref-counter which counts how many another units refers to this unit. From time to time asserts related to this refs is triggered. There is a need to rewrite this part on shared_ptr to remove this source of bugs. @Andrettin made this changes for wyrmgus (which has a huge common code base with stratagus) but... see my sentence about resources :))
But it just imho. Anyway every improvement will be appreciated.
ghost
Reading through the code in wartool.cpp, I am noticing a lot of raw pointer manipulations,
mallocs, andfrees. Since the cmake file sets the C++ standard to C++17, it might make sense to modernize some of the code.As one example,
unsigned char* ExtractEntry(unsigned char* cp, size_t* lenp)is used alot throughout the code, and if we were wanting to use something closer to idiomatic C++17 it would probably return astd::vector<unsigned char>. Even if we were wanting to continue using pointers, the result of ExtractEntry seems to be used at most once, so changing it to astd::unique_ptr<unsigned char[]>as the return value would probably make sense.There are of course other cases, but that function seems like a reasonable starting point since it is used so often. More broadly changing the IO functions from printfs and null terminated strings to
std::strings and iostreams would probably make sense as well since there are a largish number of string manipulations I saw.Let me know if there is any interest in making changes like that, or if anyone has any other concerns or ideas about a change like that.