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Subject: Re: Happy to know Ruffian will become commercial, because....

Author: José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba

Date: 04:04:17 10/23/03

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On October 23, 2003 at 05:55:12, Daniel Clausen wrote:

>On October 23, 2003 at 05:31:26, José de Jesús García Ruvalcaba wrote:
>
>>In a programming course (several years ago) we had to write the final project
>>for two different plattforms (in my case an old HP9000 and a PC under FreeBSD),
>>and the source code had to be identical, no changes allowed. I agree that it is
>>not really difficult, only some discipline is needed.
>
>It really depends on the program.
>
>The GUI-part is easily platform-dependent.

Yes, of course. In our case, we were allowed to use #IFDEF statements to check
the environmental variables, but the source files had to be identical (strictly
speaking the source code was not identical for both compilers, but you get what
the teacher meant). Disciplined students (like me) had a strict separation
between platform-dependent and platform-independent code.

>(like Arena, xboard, winboard etc)
>There are toolkits around, which are available for multiple platforms, but most
>aren't.
>

Correct. But even if you use these toolkits, it still makes sense to keep the
platform-dependent code to a minimum.

>The engine itself could easily be platform-independent, except for a small part.

A chess engine is a good example for a program that can be written almost
completely portable.

>(like multi-threading etc) Of course, as soon as you write something in Asm it
>looks different, but if it's just a tiny part, that's easy to port too.
>
>Sargon

Portable code has some performance issues. It is probably not the best idea for
performance critical tasks. In case somebody writes non-portable but faster code
(or even assembler), I think it is a good idea to keep a portable (slower)
version of the same functions. But I have self not written any code line in
years, so do not take me too seriously (:
José.



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