gregoirehenry / chart

trading chart

🌌🛰️

chart's Issues

Provide a simple way to configure the app without re-compiling it

The problem

If we want to easyling change configuration or other stuff (example plot values?) without modifying the code and recopiling we need a very simple way to do it.

For example if we could write some values in a config file that would be read by the program it would be great.

Possible solutions

config-rs

We could use the very generic config-rs crate that allow us to have a config file in many formats: JSON, TOML, YAML, HJSON, INI...

👍 Pros:

• support everything 👉 we can do anything we want

👎 Cons:

• support everything 👉 seems overkill for our use... we don't need to support 5 different syntax and layered config system
• depends on so many other crates...
• loosely typed !

.env library

We could use the dotenv standard initially created for node.js and now available for almost any programming language.

For rust the crate is here and is widely used (don't pay attention to the alpha/beta warning it is here for a long time...).

👍 Pro:

• dead simple to use !
• this provide default values but we can override it via environement variable on-the-fly just for one execution
• using the dotenv! macro makes it super easy to use

👎 Cons:

• the beta warning...

Activate static linking to SDL2 .so/.dll

The problem

The linking to SDL2 libraries is curently dynamic thus forcing us to have the SDL2 library present on the client computer. And this leads to many distribution problems.

Current solutions

Currently we have 2 different solutions depending on the platform:

• windows : we have the dll files in the repository and copy them next to the produced .exe with the compile script
• linux : we need for the client to install libsdl2.0-dev on it's machine in order to have the .so file available...

Both situations have problems:

• windows : we have an external library hosted on the repository in pure binary form, we WILL forget to update it if it has any (security) update
• linux : we do not even check during compilation il the lib is present ! And we shouldn't rely on non explicit dependancy

Roadmap to solutions

• windows remove the .dlls from the repository and modify the compile script to download them via wget from their source repository to the destination usr directory.
• linux in compile script check for the presence of the lib before comiling and provide a clean error message providing relevent informations on how to install libsdl2.0-dev
• both switch to real static linking and integrate the libsdl inside the executable

.gitignore file is missing

We need to add a rust compatible .gitignore file ! This is just common sense.

We could reuse (meaning copy-paste it !) the one provided by rust itself. It's not perfect but it's largely enough for our project.

Cursor flickering while moving fast

The problem

When moving the cursor quite fast, we can see the horizontal and vertical lines that follow the cursor getting doubled.

The suspects

This may be a double buffering not activated problem or a software rendering instead of hardware rendering.

Other possible suspect : clean ➡️ fill with background (missing ?) ➡️ draw ➡️ blit

TODO list

• invertigate the SDL2 initialisation
• do some tests with different config
• find the right config and apply it cleanly

Improve project name detection

The compile script use the name of its parent dir to retrieve the project name. Saddly the name of this dir can be (and is often) changed when cloning the rep... resulting in an error at the end of the compilation.

Improve the errors handling

The problem

At the moment error handling is basically based on "put a ? after each possible error and don't bother to write an error message". Even in functions that do not return a Result<T, E> type or a Option<T> type...

What could be done

• use properly ?, unwrap() and expect()
• use the anyhow crate for simple and advanced error handling
• add some log with the simplelog crate also read std log crate that define the interface