noitu/plans/260904-1125-noi-tu-web-game/phase-02-go-dictionary-and-normalization.md

title, status, phase, priority, effort, dependencies

title	status	phase	priority	effort	dependencies
Phase 2: Go Dictionary and Normalization	todo	2	P1	2d	1

Phase 2: Go Dictionary and Normalization

Overview

The read-side of the dictionary: a Go package that normalizes arbitrary player input the same way the builder normalized the corpus, and a read-only SQLite store exposing the three lookups the game engine needs. Everything above this layer treats words as opaque strings.

Requirements

Functional

• vietnamese.Normalize(raw) (word string, syllables []string, err error) — NFC, lowercase, whitespace collapse, syllable split (any syllable count; length rules belong to the engine)
• Store resolves a player-typed variant to its canonical word via aliases
• Store.Resolve(word) → canonical word + exists
• Store.WordsStartingWith(syllable) → words (for bot move generation)
• Store.OutDegree(syllable) → int (0 means dead end)
• Store opens the DB read-only; concurrent-safe for many goroutines

Non-functional

• Lookup ≤ 1ms p99 under 100 concurrent readers
• Normalization identical to the builder's — shared code path, not a reimplementation (DRY)

Architecture

internal/vietnamese is imported by both server/cmd/build-dictionary and the server, so the corpus and player input can never diverge. Phase 1 writes the builder against this package; this phase hardens and tests it.

// internal/vietnamese
func Normalize(raw string) (string, []string, error)  // NFC + lower + collapse + split
const MinSyllables = 2
func HasEnoughSyllables(sylls []string) bool          // len(sylls) >= MinSyllables

// internal/dictionary — loaded fully into memory at Open; no runtime SQL.
type Store struct{ /* maps, all written once during Open */ }
func Open(path string) (*Store, error)     // file:...?mode=ro, closed before Open returns
func (s *Store) Resolve(word string) (canonical string, ok bool)
func (s *Store) LastSyllable(word string) (string, bool)
func (s *Store) WordsStartingWith(syl string) []string   // shared slice, do not modify
func (s *Store) OutDegree(syl string) (int, error)       // ErrNotFound if unknown
func (s *Store) RandomOpeningWord(minOutDegree int) (string, error)
func (s *Store) WordCount() int
func (s *Store) AliasCount() int
func (s *Store) License() string

Revised during implementation — measured, not assumed. The original design queried SQLite per lookup and kept only syllables in memory. Measurement rejected that: a SQL round-trip benchmarked at 55us against 8.9ns for a map hit. It would also have threatened phase 3, where the hard bot explores hundreds of candidate moves inside a 150ms budget.

(An earlier draft justified this with a "p99 of 1.0046ms". That figure was wrong — the Windows clock quantizes time.Now() to ~1ms, so it measured timer resolution, not the code. Cite the benchmark, which does not time individual operations, and do not reintroduce a latency test built on time.Now() around a nanosecond-scale call.)

The whole dictionary is now loaded at Open and the database closed immediately. Measured on the real 48,216-word corpus: ~70ms load, ~7.8 MB heap, and per operation, all allocation-free:

Operation	Cost	Allocations
Resolve	8.9 ns	0
WordsStartingWith (full iteration)	10.7 ns	0
OutDegree	15 ns	0
RandomOpeningWord	18 ns	0

Resolve returns no error (a map lookup cannot fail) and Close is gone — there is nothing left open. The result is both faster and simpler: no connection pool, no prepared statements, no tail latency.

WordsStartingWith returns an iter.Seq[string], not a slice. Returning the backing slice let a caller sort, shuffle or append into dictionary state: verified on the real corpus, a caller's write landed in the Store, 2,449 of 5,049 buckets had spare capacity for append to scribble into, and -race confirmed the write/write race across goroutines. An iterator removes the hazard structurally rather than by comment.

Open validates what it loaded against the builder's meta.word_count, cross-checks every syllables.out_degree against the words actually indexed, and rejects orphan aliases. Without that, a truncated database opens cleanly and the server starts, rejects every word a player types, and fails every room creation.

Resolve order: exact hit in words → else aliases lookup → else not found.

The engine chains on the canonical word, never on the alias the player typed. Canonicalization can move either end of the word. In the shipped dictionary roughly half the aliases differ in the last syllable and more than a third in the first — typing sỹ hai resolves to sĩ hai, moving the first syllable from sỹ to sĩ. An engine that link-checked against the syllables the player typed would therefore reject legal moves. Resolve returns the canonical form and FirstSyllable/LastSyllable report that form's ends; phase 3 must use those, never vietnamese.Normalize's split of the raw input. All lookups are map reads; the database is closed before Open returns.

Hot-path caching: OutDegree is read on every bot move. Load the whole syllables table into a map[string]int at Open (a few tens of thousands of entries, ~1MB) and serve from memory. WordsStartingWith stays on SQL — the result sets are small and per-turn.

Opening word selection: pick uniformly from words whose last syllable has out_degree >= minOutDegree, so a game never dies on move one.

Related Code Files

• Create: server/internal/vietnamese/normalize.go
• Create: server/internal/vietnamese/normalize_test.go
• Create: server/internal/dictionary/store.go
• Create: server/internal/dictionary/store_test.go
• Create: server/internal/dictionary/testdata/mini.db — small fixture DB built by a test helper
• Modify: server/go.mod — add modernc.org/sqlite, golang.org/x/text
• Modify: server/cmd/build-dictionary/main.go — import internal/vietnamese instead of local normalization

Implementation Steps

1. Implement Normalize: norm.NFC.String → strings.ToLower → strings.Fields → rejoin; return error on empty input.
2. Point the phase-1 builder at internal/vietnamese so one normalizer serves both sides.
3. dictionary.Open: DSN with mode=ro, verify meta table exists and log word_count + source_license at startup (license visibility).
4. Prepared statements for Resolve (words), Resolve (aliases), WordsStartingWith.
5. Load syllables into an in-memory map at open; OutDegree reads the map.
6. RandomOpeningWord via ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1 over a joined out-degree filter.
7. Test helper that builds a tiny fixture DB in t.TempDir() from a hardcoded word set — no dependency on the real 60k DB in unit tests.
8. Tests: NFC equivalence (composed vs decomposed ữ), uppercase input, tabs/NBSP/multiple spaces, 1-syllable rejected while 3- and 4-syllable accepted, alias resolution for hoà/thuý/quí, unknown word, dead-end syllable returns 0.
9. Concurrency test: 100 goroutines × 1000 Resolve calls, -race clean.

Success Criteria

• go test ./internal/... -race green
• Composed and decomposed spellings of the same word both resolve to one canonical entry
• Words of 2, 3, and 4 syllables all resolve; a 1-syllable input is rejected by HasEnoughSyllables
• hoà lợi-style tone variants resolve via aliases
• Store refuses to open a missing or writable-mode DB path with a clear error
• Startup log line names the data source and license
• Builder and server share one normalization implementation (no duplicate NFC/lowercase logic)

Risk Assessment

Risk	Signal	Response
modernc.org/sqlite read performance disappoints under load	p99 lookup > 1ms in the concurrency test	Widen the in-memory cache: load words into a map[string]string too (~60k entries, a few MB) and use SQL only for cold paths
Normalization drift between builder and server	A word in the DB fails to match the same string typed by a player	Prevented structurally by the shared package; a regression test asserts round-trip on a sample of real DB rows
strings.Fields mishandles an exotic Unicode space	Rare rejection reports	strings.Fields already splits on all unicode.IsSpace; test explicitly covers NBSP and tab