July Summary

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This is the third month of the rewrite. I thought I'd be writing code to edit text by now, but it turns out there was a lot more I didn't understand well and wanted to get out of the way. Specifically, how to write async code without it being annoying, this involved

1. Having the main and background thread talk to each other without race conditions and locks
2. Dealing with messages that have 1 to many responses
3. A way to change what events do that wasn't error-prone, my first draft didn't have enough types.
4. Having different types of events, some of which are mandatory for proceeding. I'd need to receive the load font results before I could draw a window, but not necessarily the load project response (network drives may disconnect).

Without going too much into details, I end up having the async system separate from threading. This allowed me to choose events in a specific order and have them deterministically run in that order. This lets me write easy-to-understand unit test. For the lockless data structures and async communication, I had to audit and test separately. Once I was sure it was correct, I could be confident that any strangeness would be handling events in an unexpected order and not bugs in the thread code.

I read up on how different OSes file API and async functions, I don't really like any of them. I was busy enough with the above that I didn't write a wrapper to deal with it, although I did experiment with a directory iterator. The code made it easy to handle subdirectories, but didn't improve my confidence in what would happen if a network disk went down.

Something that has nothing to do with events or async was rendering. I went through all my drawing code and changed it to generate vertices instead of calling the graphics api directly. If I want to start caching parts of the window this would make it easier to do so.