How do you know you improved ?

[mvanthoor]

Once you add King safety to Rustic, I think you'll start to see a very attractive personality emerge.

That will be one of the first things to add after the pawn hash and other pawn-related stuff. I first want to have knowledge of passed pawns in there, because right now, a pawn is a pawn... so Rustic happily swaps its white 6th rank covered passed pawn for black's useless isolated e5 pawn... This stuff will probably appear in Rustic 6.

I think it'll be a nice project to have on the resume.

It is one of the reasons why I (finally) wrote Rustic. I often get the question if I can show some code I wrote in the past; but I can't because everything I write is for one employer or another. So with Rustic and derivative projects I'll have something to show if anyone ever asks again.(Even though I'm of the opinion that while you can ask this from a 24 y/o who just left school, but not (anymore) from someone who has been working for a software engineer for 14-15 years. If people want to see code from the past it always sets my teeth on edge. As if I still have to prove that I can write software. I'm half-way through my career already. I'm _almost_ at the point where I'm closer to retirement than at the start.

Hopefully, this more rigorous testing process will result in the next release of Blunder (currently slated as 8.0.0) having feature parity or even fewer features than Blunder 7.6.0, and yet being stronger.

Well see how well that goes in a month or two, once I've finished my re-write

Good luck. I hope you're going to improve / rewrite functions one by one? I did a massive refactoring effort for Rustic during the implementation of XBoard and the run-up to 4.0, but I didn't rewrite everything and I didn't start from scratch, obviously.

[algerbrex]

Good luck. I hope you're going to improve / rewrite functions one by one? I did a massive refactoring effort for Rustic during the implementation of XBoard and the run-up to 4.0, but I didn't rewrite everything and I didn't start from scratch, obviously.

Right, the plan is to go through each and every file with a figurative fine-tooth comb to see what can be improved/catch subtle bugs. So maybe it's a bit more accurate to say I'm doing extensive re-factoring versus starting completely from scratch using no old code. Nevertheless, I still imagine much of the codebase will be changing. But I'm not going to change code, just for the sake of changing things. If I play around with some code for a good bit and I can't find any improvements, even aesthetically, then I'll leave it as is/copy & paste it, since I'll have confirmed to some degree that the current method is the best method I could come up with.