Tiny MCU 3D Renderer Part 10: Benchmarking, profiling, and optimizations

The reason I have been so quiet recently is because I've been working on a very dry subject; testing. Unit tests are probably the most uninteresting thing I do on a daily basis as a software architect. Create some fixtures, write some assertions, run the test suite, fix any issues, repeat. It makes me cringe, just thinking about it.

But here I am, blogging about how I've been writing tests in my fun personal project, too! I am taking this project very seriously, so tests are a necessary evil. I haven't checked coverage yet (because I hit this bug with tarpaulin vs serde_derive), but it's probably somewhere around 70~80%.

Update 2017-11-05: serde_derive is only used in the app. The lib doesn't have this dependency, so I can run coverage on the lib separately. The result is even better than I imagined: 85.14% coverage, 573/673 lines covered

Surprise! There are only 26 tests (ignoring the 4 benchmark tests), how can coverage to be so high? This is one of the most interesting things about 3D rasterization; it doesn't require a whole lot of code! To be honest, though, I'm only exposing the bare minimum set of APIs; for example there's no support in the fixed function pipeline for stencil/scissor, alpha blending, etc.