Author: Don Dailey
Date: 19:56:21 07/20/99
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On July 20, 1999 at 17:58:34, Robert Pawlak wrote: >I'd be interested to hear what some of the people directly involved with the >development of chess software think about Linux. > >Specifically, do you think that it is now/will be a platform worth developing >for. From a layman's standpoint, I would think that it would not be too >difficult to port an engine written in ANSI C over to Linux, then use Tkl or >something like it to build an interface. > >Also, do you think that the development tools are sufficiently mature to >undertake something like this? > >But, I realize that not all engines are coded in C... As a side question, what >is the percentage of chess engines coded in C, and in assembler? > >Bob P. I have been considering the question from the completely opposite point of view, is Windows a viable platform for chess program development? We have developed everything here in unix (and linux) and I think it's a complete non issue, you can write a program for either OS and it should be just fine. I cannot think of anything that makes a difference. Unix is a lot more robust and stable, almost all our unix machines have run for months without a reboot, I don't think there has ever been a windows machine that can do this. But this has little to do with writing a strong chess program. You can probably get a million different opinions on this subject but I would just use whatever platform you are most comfortable with. We are working with both windows and unix (linux included) and we do our any serious testing and development on unix, it's simply a whole lot more reliable and definitely more stable. Remember, unix has been around forever, Windows is realatively new and still quite buggy but this will improve. One big advantage of using a linux machine is that you can be sure you won't have to reboot it, it will run for weeks or months without a reboot being needed. This is still a big problem even on an NT machine. Some of our developers here at MIT won't develop on a windows machine and believe the multitasking is still very weak. The issue is having lots of jobs running simultaneously with lots of windows up and running. They tell me windows gets very slow and unhappy when you try to do more than one or two thing at a time. I have read a lot of stuff that claims windows is fine in this area, so I don't really know if this is a problem. But I know it's NOT a problem on a unix machine. Don't forget that a lot of fine programs are developed on either platform. I think Bob Hyatt does most of his Crafty work on linux. So I really don't think this is an OS issue. Another reason why we develop on UNIX is simply that the big machines in the world are unix machines. I don't know of any 500 processor NT machines and I want my program to be able to run on any machine that becomes available to us. I don't really consider windows a viable platform for WHAT WE DO for this very reason. Windows is getting a lot better, but we still consider it small potatoes and not really a serious platform for the kind of research we do. But then the departement I work in is called "supercomputing technologies." - Don
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