Author: Dave Gomboc
Date: 21:59:54 06/12/03
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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. You confuse both specification of a protocol with a particular implementation of that specification, and also platform-specific methods of dynamically loading libraries versus the general ability of common modern operating systems to allow libraries to be dynamically loaded. As someone who has acquired a distaste for looking at code that implements the XBoard protocol, I would find it hard to believe that the protocol ChessBase uses is inherently inferior. If their implementation leaves something to be desired in the nature of crash-protection, and if there were a compelling business reason to do so, then I am sure they could improve it. Also, operation on non-Windows operating systems falls into this category. Dave
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