Proposal: Code Quality Enhancements

[hunhoffe]

As seed-emulator grows, I thought it might be useful to suggest a few PRs for general code improvement and maintenance. I may work slow, but if the seed devs agree that these are good ideas, I am happy to work on these PRs as time allows.

Use standard libraries for logging and inheritance (PR 1)

• Remove use of individually created logging functions in favor of using the logging library
  • Using the logging library will reduce the number of logging functions, which should reduce lines of code in seed-emulator
  • Using a centralized to configure logging for the entire library just once will make it easier to log to a file or stdout. Right now, if you wanted to do that, you'd have to manually change stderr to something else in every individual logging function.
• Use abc python library for inheritance
  • Currently, for methods that subclasses should implement, seed uses NotImplementedErrors. When an unimplemented method is called, the error will be thrown. Instead, using the abc @abstractmethod decorator on abstract function, an error about missing implementations will be thrown as soon as a subclass is instantiated. This will avoid subtle bugs that are currently uncaught, like the Filter class being marked as printable but not actually implementing the print function

    seed-emulator/seedemu/core/Binding.py

    Line 31 in 3749042

    class Filter(Printable):

Use static tools to standardize code formatting and catch type errors (PR 2)

• Add code style linter as GitHub action, with instruction in README for running manually during development
  • There are many options for linters, but I was thinking Black might be a good option
• Add python static type checking as GitHub action, with instruction in README for running manually during development
  • There are probably other tools but I was thinking mypy might be a good option.

Automated Testing & Additional Tests (PR 3)

• Add existing SEED example-based tests as GitHub action
  • I believe these more fall under Integration Tests than Unit Tests, although I think it’s perfectly acceptable to use the unit test library to implement them
  • I haven't thought too much about what additional testing might look like, so I'll leave this open.
• Add unit tests to various classes & add as GitHub action

Document Generation and Hosting (PR 4)

• Create a github action that checks for documentation errors when building with doxygen
• It should be possible to serve the doxygen docs using github pages, with updates automatically on merging PRs into main

[kevin-w-du]

These are very good ideas. We look forward to your contributions.