Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 23:13:06 07/20/99
Go up one level in this thread
On July 20, 1999 at 22:56:21, Don Dailey wrote: >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." please don't confuse UNIX with Linux >- Don
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