filling out rust article

docs/articles/rust/article.md

@@ -3,38 +3,167 @@
 This article describes parts of A/B Street's implementation that might be of
 interest to the Rust community.
 
-TODO: TOC
+<!--ts-->
 
-TODO: go through all notes (and delete duplicate stuff)
+- [Notes on Rust in A/B Street](#notes-on-rust-in-ab-street)
+  - [ezgui](#ezgui)
+    - [Wizard and WrappedWizard](#wizard-and-wrappedwizard)
+  - [Test runner](#test-runner)
+  - [Grievances](#grievances)
+  - [Appendix: Code organization](#appendix-code-organization)
+
+<!-- Added by: dabreegster, at: Mon Apr 22 15:46:36 PDT 2019 -->
+
+<!--te-->
 
 ## ezgui
 
-Not to complicate the GUI debate even more, but...
+After dabbling with the [existing GUI frameworks](http://areweguiyet.com/), I
+wound up rolling my own, highly specialized to my use case. I originally used
+Piston for underlying rendering, but I eventually switched to glium to stop
+uploading so much geometry constantly. A/B Street only makes use of OpenGL 3
+features and seems to work fine on Linux, Windows, and Mac. I don't have any
+interest in Vulkan and the other newer things, but would love to also get A/B
+Street running in the browser with WebGL or similar.
 
-### WrappedWizard
+The ezgui library exposes a very simple, immediate-mode API. There's no messy
+synchronization between application and GUI state; the application just asks
+what events happened and says what to draw. There are basic widgets for text
+entry and menus (with hotkeys). The application creates and stores these, passes
+events along to them, and asks them to draw themselves. There's no layouting,
+besides options to align individual widgets. A "canvas" (really a 2D camera)
+handles basic panning and zooming.
 
-## Timer plumbing
+[This](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/eae301ee1bde247be5a2b067f6a4eadaa68aa6e7/synthetic/src/main.rs)
+is a simple example of usage. In the `event` method, the application checks its
+own current state and, based on that, tests for relevant key-presses or clicks.
+At the bottom of the screen, the current possible actions are shown with their
+hotkey -- a king of cheap context-sensitive help function. `draw` is simple as
+well; `ezgui` just exposes methods to draw a colored polygon and render text.
+Large batches of geometry can be uploaded once, then cheaply redrawn later.
 
-doubles as Warn, kind of a logger
+![](hotkeys.gif)
 
-that recent mailing list thread
+One mildly hilarious feature I have to mention is the
+[screen capture](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/eae301ee1bde247be5a2b067f6a4eadaa68aa6e7/ezgui/src/widgets/screenshot.rs)
+tool. I wanted a way to visually compare the Seattle maps I'm rendering, so I
+can verify my changes to intersection layout code don't quietly butcher some
+part of the map I'm not looking at. I tried a few different ways of coercing
+glium to rendering to one big texture and saving to a file, but the result was
+extremely slow unless I compiled in release mode (which is absolutely not an
+option in the middle of debugging hairy geometry code). So instead, the
+application can ask the `ezgui` layer to zoom in some amount, then take a bunch
+of left-to-right, top-to-bottom steps over the canvas, calling an external
+screenshot tool after each render. Sometimes the quick hack works perfectly.
+
+I would consider cleaning up `ezgui` and publishing it as a generally usable
+crate, except it's pretty crippled:
+
+- the text rendering is very primitive; font size is fixed
+- basic widgets like a scrolling text box, list with radio buttons, and tables
+  are missing
+- The imperative style makes it quite easy for different parts of the UI to
+  stomp on each other, both using the same key. I'm not happy with how the
+  paradigm scales, and want to experiment with other solutions before leading
+  somebody else down the same hole I'm digging myself out of.
+
+I'm still unsure if I'll keep making ezgui handle the growing complexity of A/B
+Street's UI or if I'll try to adapt something else.
+
+### Wizard and WrappedWizard
+
+One trick I'm super proud of is the "wizard"-style dialogs for asking a series
+of questions. Suppose you have a struct with a bunch of fields, like
+[SpawnOverTime](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/eae301ee1bde247be5a2b067f6a4eadaa68aa6e7/sim/src/make/scenario.rs).
+You want to prompt the user to fill out this struct, maybe even branching the
+questions you ask based on previous answers.
+
+My solution to this problem is
+[edit_scenario](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/eae301ee1bde247be5a2b067f6a4eadaa68aa6e7/editor/src/plugins/edit/scenarios.rs),
+which is called once per event (keypress). This code is extremely easy to write
+and maintain; the complexity of the user prompts being filled out slowly over
+the course of many `event()` and `draw()` calls is invisible. The
+`WrappedWizard` works by storing confirmed responses and some widget
+representing the current question. So the first many rounds, the `choose_string`
+call for "What kind of edit" just defers to an ezgui Menu, which keeps its own
+state about the current selected item. Once the Menu is done, WrappedWizard
+stores the String response. The next time `choose_string` is called, it
+immediately returns that answer, so `edit_scenario` makes it to the next step.
+This is a simple way of simulating continuations. WrappedWizard returns `None`
+for incomplete answers, and the `?` short-circuiting takes care of the rest.
 
 ## Test runner
 
-sane output, and being able to embed really useful hotlinks
+Usability problems with the Rust test runner make it useless for my purposes.
+When a test fails, I want STDOUT and STDERR in a log file, not inlined with
+information on test runs. I sometimes want to surface a custom string in the
+main test results that lets me quickly re-run a failed test with a GUI. So I
+wrote
+[this](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/eae301ee1bde247be5a2b067f6a4eadaa68aa6e7/tests/src/runner.rs)
+to solve my needs, at least until https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/50297
+makes progress.
 
-## Determinism
+![](tests.gif)
-
-no binary heap :(
-
-forking rng
 
 ## Grievances
 
-Compile times. Tiny tweak in geom, everything that depends on it also gets
+No surprises here: compile times suck. It's especially frustrating to add a few
-recompiled. Might just be relinking, but feels slow enough to be redoing stuff.
+lines to `geom` for debugging (not affecting any of the crate's external APIs),
-Very painful.
+then wait for the dependent crates `map_model`, `sim`, and `editor` to recompile
+(or maybe just link again, but it sure is slow). It's also frustrating to
+recompile all dependencies from scratch when I switch between compiling for
+Linux and Windows.
+
+There are a few crates with binary heaps for priority queues, but I couldn't
+make any of them work with Serde, have deterministic behavior (so no hashing
+underneath), and act as a min-heap instead of a max-heap.
+
+Otherwise, Rust is amazing! Sometimes the borrow checker makes me express
+something awkwardly, but mostly it's forced me to avoid bad ideas.
 
 ## Appendix: Code organization
 
-by crate
+If you're going to dig into the code, it helps to know what all the crates are.
+The most interesting crates are `map_model`, `sim`, and `editor`.
+
+Constructing the map:
+
+- `convert_osm`: extract useful data from OpenStreetMap and other data sources,
+  emit intermediate map format
+- `gtfs`: simple library to just extract coordinates of bus stops
+- `kml`: extract shapes from KML shapefiles
+- `map_model`: the final representation of the map, also conversion from the
+  intermediate map format into the final format
+- `precompute`: small tool to run the second stage of map conversion and write
+  final output
+
+Traffic simulation:
+
+- `sim`: all of the agent-based simulation logic
+- `headless`: tool to run a simulation without any visualization
+
+Graphics:
+
+- `editor`: the GUI and main gameplay
+- `ezgui`: an immediate-mode GUI library
+
+Common utilities:
+
+- `abstutil`: a grab-bag of IO helpers, timing and logging utilities, etc
+- `geom`: types for GPS and map-space points, lines, angles, polylines,
+  polygons, circles, durations, speeds
+- `tests`: a custom test runner and some tests using it
+
+Less interesting stuff:
+
+- `analyze_code`: a static analysis attempt to construct a call-graph using
+  `syn`
+- `benchmark_pathfinding`: experimenting with an implementation of contraction
+  hierarchies
+- `debug_initialmap`: tool to debug intermediate form of maps, useful for
+  intersection merging
+- `halloween`: a toy to render maps in a "creepy" way
+- `playground_gui`: interactive debugging of basic geometric algorithms
+- `synthetic`: GUI for creating and editing "synthetic" maps from scratch
+- `tmp_gfx`: glium experiments
+- `viewer`: an experiment in making generic applications for manipulating maps

docs/design/notes/tradeoffs.md

@@ -5,3 +5,5 @@
 But now...
 - stop sign intersections have a red line whenever there are multiple lanes, because the lanes can conflict with each other
 	- maybe OK since there's no concept of speed
+
+## Sidewalks: contraflow or not?