Connect 4

To set up rust

Follow the instructions here

To run

cargo run

To test

cargo test

Acceptance Tests

I will be developing this following acceptance test driven development, otherwise known as double loop TDD. You will notice there is a separate test file. This is sometimes thought of as non-idiomatic rust, but acceptance tests are high level and not tied to an individual file or even module. So I store them independently.

The three versions

I got a wee bit carried away - which tends to happen when I write rust.

submission is the formal submission. I spent a couple of hours and it works and I'm happy with it. overengineered was the start of the problem. I got very curious about how I could improve the system and enable it to support custom rulesets by using some kind of strategy / pipeline pattern for the win conditions. remove_consts was the final thing I wanted to do. I wanted to be able to customise board size. But because of a choice I made very early, using const generics to size the board, this became impossible to assign dynamically. I wanted to have a sized array rather than a vector because I believe it's easier for the compiler to optimise the memory of. Vecs allocate to the heap whereas arrays can allocate to the stack. I thought the choice would give me the freedom to assign different board sizes in the future, but it became clear that it was impossible. I ended up using vecs. I think that the game itself is still assigned to the stack because the Vec is essentially a pointer to heap allocated data. (as far as I know).