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Subject: Re: Can a Programming Language Cause Engines to be Slow?

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 11:26:37 11/13/02

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On November 13, 2002 at 12:33:53, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:

>On November 13, 2002 at 12:13:59, Bob Durrett wrote:
>
>[snip]
>>But is it not true that C, for example, used on a Linux machine is somewhat
>>different from C used on a Windows machine?  The choice of operating system
>>surely must impact the guts of the language used. Maybe the language, such as C,
>>is better suited for use with one OS than another.  True?
>>
>
>I think what you are getting at is that there are different versions of
>compilers for different OS's, e.g. MSVC for windows produces code that is ~10%
>faster than gcc for linux.

The best compiler I know of for chess programming (Intel's) is available for
both Win32 and Linux.

For Win32 and Linux as choices, there is little difference.  Go with whichever
you are more comfortable with.  If you write your code in ANSI/ISO C then it
will port to anything under the sun with a simple recompile.  Therefore, the OS
is almost completely irrelevant.

The choice of algorithm is literally orders of magnitude more important than the
choice of programming language.  But you can cost yourself 50 ELO or so with a
slower choice (e.g. Java, VB.NET, and other interpreted languages are simply not
going to be as fast, despite all the protests of the prognosticators)

On the other hand, if you are more comfortable in one of these langauges, you
will probably write your best possible engine by using one of them.



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