Author: Mike Hood
Date: 08:49:16 06/10/03
Go up one level in this thread
On June 10, 2003 at 00:22:39, Russell Reagan wrote: >On June 09, 2003 at 22:51:05, Dave Gomboc wrote: > >>Your suggestion that their protocol is poorly thought out appears to be fully >>unjustified. Or at least, you haven't provided any justification -- which would >>be difficult to do, seeing as you don't know what the protocol is. >> >>Dave > >Using a DLL for this purpose has the drawbacks of: > >1. It is not portable, which means porting to another OS requires implementing a >different protocol, or writing your own GUI. Fortunately, the winboard protocol >is easy to implement. > >2. As a DLL, the engine becomes part of the GUI process, which means that if the >engine crashes, the GUI crashes, and vice versa. Since not crashing is pretty >much a higher priority than ANYTHING, this seems like a poorly thought out >choice. > >I already stated both of these justifications. Maybe there are good reasons for >choosing a DLL approach that outweigh the drawbacks, but most important is that >the program works correctly, and from a theoretical point of view, it's better >not to put all of your eggs in one basket, so to speak. To be honest, I don't blame Chessbase in this matter. They programmed their engine interface in the method recommended by Microsoft, which is what most programmers would have done. If anything, the blame lies with Microsoft for not suggesting text pipes as a superior method of interprocess communication for applications like these. We have to be thankful to Tim Mann for finding the alternative.
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