Building and Testing Tezad in Go 1.6 vs 1.7

Go 1.7 just got released! How does Tezad fair?

Tezad is pezad's puzzle game project, written in Go. It still has quite a lot of polishing ahead of it, but at least the game is playable (besides not knowing where the boundaries are). Take a look:

The latest version of Tezad, built on Go 1.7. Look at me almost get a home run, or a quadruple, or whatever the non-infringing name would be!

It's got lots of other stuff though: A game that ramps up gravity every 10 line clears; gravity which can drop 2 or more lines every frame towards the higher end, even instantly dropping to the bottom on the last levels; CW and CCW rotation, fast drop, instant drop, wall kicks, a ghost tetromino that will show where your tetromino will land... you can even hold tetrominoes too, it's just too bad you can't see what you're holding.

Go 1.7 supposedly has a compiler that will make smaller and faster binaries, and will do this faster than previous versions of Go. Let's try it out!

I can test the compile times and binary sizes easily enough, but the game doesn't yet have an automated benchmarking tool. What it does have is unit test for core parts of the game logic, all running parallel. So, I ran a bash script to build Tezad in a loop n times, and another script to loop over running the tests n times as well.

Turns out they weren't lying! Take a look:

Go Version	1.6	1.7	diff	ratio
Total build time sec	63.283	57.426	-5.857	90.74%
Total builds	25	25	0	100.00%
Avg build time sec	2.53132	2.29704	-0.23428	90.74%
Tezad size bytes	5055696	4531984	-523712	89.64%
Tezad size MiB	4.821487427	4.322036743	-0.4994506836	89.64%
Total test time sec	91.836	70.13	-21.706	76.36%
Total tests	25	25	0	100.00%
Avg test time sec	3.67344	2.8052	-0.86824	76.36%

As tested on an old 13-inch late 2009 MacBook with 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB DDR3, Crucial M2 256GB SSD.

Build time improved over 9%, size of the binary improved over 10%, and the time to run the tests improved over 24%. Not too shabby for not changing a single line of code!

(As an aside, you may be wondering what happened to Tezad since you saw it around 2010 or so. That was the C++ version. The new one is a complete rewrite. Code isn't yet available to the public, but someday it should be.)