Hi,

I'm writing to announce I have completed my port of the checkmm verifier
from C++ to TypeScript.  The test suite passes.

If you have nodejs installed (and tens of millions of developers worldwide
do) you can verify an mm file in your current working directory with a
command, e.g.

npx checkmm set.mm

Though naturally it's more efficient to install my checkmm package first.

Link to package and source code repositories here
https://www.npmjs.com/package/checkmm
https://github.com/Antony74/checkmm-ts


(that's the announcement done, just a few remarks to follow).

The O(n^2) problem I mentioned previously turned out to be due to the
JavaScript Array.shift operation (which removes an item from the front of
an array) being an O(n) operation which was used n times.  Glauco reports
previously having a similarly unexpected problem with Array.slice.  The
takeaway from this is to make sure you properly understand the capabilities
of whatever containers you decide to use, and in particular to be wary of a
JavaScript array that might be a million items or more long.

I just reversed the array, by the way - which is also an O(n) operation,
but I only had to do it once, then my tokens could be removed in the
desired order with Array.pop which is an O(1) operation.

What enabled me to track down this problem in about three quarters of an
hour was knowing my way around the Visual Studio Code debugger - that's
what I didn't have in 2019 when I first encountered this difficulty.
Debuggers have their detractors (Linus Torvalds is probably the best
known), and in the context investigating performance issues they're
sometimes called the "poor man's profiler", but personally I find a
debugger to be an indispensable general purpose tool

I did this port because I like Eric Schmidt's C++ source code for checkmm.
I alway respect a job well done by source code, but actually it's quite
rare for me to like the source code itself.  As such my port should be
pretty faithful to the original.  Hopefully you should almost be able to
step through the two source files line-by-line and treat it like a Rosetta
Stone between C++ and TypeScript.

C++: https://github.com/Antony74/checkmm-ts/blob/main/cpp/checkmm.cpp
TypeScript: https://github.com/Antony74/checkmm-ts/blob/main/src/checkmm.ts

It should be said though that reading code written with C++'s Standard
Template Library containers is a bit of a specialised skill.  It's never
let me down with unexpectedly slow operations not immediately obvious from
the documentation like JavaScript has above, but with that caveat aside, I
anticipate my TypeScript port being found to be slightly easier to read.

    Best regards,

        Antony

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