The developer writes
At various times in my “day job/career” I’ve used commercial profilers with varying results, but I don’t want or need to profile the whole application or even a whole library. I also don’t want to code two solutions into my product in order to let a normal profiler test them side by side in order to remove the loser later.The problem about creating additional solutions also occurs in testing and when writing small utilities and editors while developing your game.
F# scripts help avoid this issue. You can add number of .fsx files to your project, and executing them using F# interactive (aka fsi) is very easy. For my current game, I have a script to render parts of my engine data using XNA and winforms, and another script to test some of the game logic. I don't know how long I will need these, but the day I lose the use for them, removing them is as easy as removing a single file from your project. Compare that to removing an entire project, which in my case would involve getting out of Visual Studio and using Windows Explorer then TortoiseHg.
Back to the topic of measuring performance, did you know about the #time command you can use in fsi:
> #time "on";; --> Timing now on randomTest();; Real: 00:00:15.761, CPU: 00:00:54.725, GC gen0: 1917, gen1: 2, gen2: 0
Note that you get information about garbage collection too, which is interesting information when developing games for the Xbox 360.
Regarding testing, I just found out yet another case when pattern matching saves the day. In the code extract below, I'm using it to express the expected result of the code being tested.
match gs'.player_units with
| [| _; [| { health = x } |] |] when x < 1.0f -> true // Injured
| [| _; [||] |] -> true // Killed
| _ -> false
player_units is an array of player units, where players units are represented using arrays of units. My test has an artillery belonging to the first player fire at a helpless infantry of the second player.
The first branch of the pattern matching says: "An array composed of two elements where the first element can be anything, and the second element is a one-element array of units where x is the value of field health, and x is strictly less than 1".
I don't know how I would have written that in C# in a similarly concise fashion.
Informally, my pattern match checks that the unit of the second player was injured or killed.
