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Subject: Re: I'd recommend Delphi

Author: David Blackman

Date: 01:55:29 10/25/99

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On October 25, 1999 at 03:41:30, Steve Maughan wrote:

>On October 24, 1999 at 18:22:24, Daniel Clausen wrote:
>
>>Most people only decide between C, C++ and VB, *if* they decide
>
>As the title suggests I would recommend Delphi.  In my test it's as fast (if not
>faster) than VC++, its much easier to learn and read, which generally leads to
>faster development cycles.  In addition it also supports 64 bit integers that
>can make life simpler for chess programming

Delphi has got the minimum features you need for chess programming. If you own
it and enjoy working with it, then it's a reasonable choice, i guess. Otherwise
i suspect it's not the best choice.

All objects go on the heap, i think? And the the object overhead is usually
bigger than for C++ for other reasons as well. I suspect if you cared about
speed, you'd avoid using objects and classes for anything that could be in an
inside loop. By contrast, with a good C++ compiler and a little care the
overhead for using objects can be zero most of the time.

So with Delphi you might end up writing most of the tough stuff without objects.
That's certainly possible to do, but might not be what most people would have in
mind when they chose Delphi over something else.

Apart from that, the impression of the Delphi programmers around here is that
the runtime speed is "acceptable" rather than "blindingly fast". Getting the
last 20% of raw speed is not all that important for computer chess, so maybe
this is ok. And maybe the programmers here have missed some important compiler
flags?



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