Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 06:44:18 11/23/99
Go up one level in this thread
On November 22, 1999 at 22:48:21, John Wish wrote:
>Do differing operating systems affect the effeciency of chess software? Would
>Mchess, Rebel, Chessmaster, Shredder, etc, operate any better on linux than on
>windows?
Basically the compiler gives the real difference for most programs.
For example gcc is like 8% slower than msvc for DIEP,
but obviously gcc gives more problems and doesn't support
windows API, otherwise i might write something that
works under windows and linux as well graphically.
right now diep works only under windows and sometimes i compile it
also for linux but then only textmode (or xboard mode whateveryou
want to call it it's console).
making a cool interface under linux is not harder than under windows,
but under windows youhave masses of examples how to do something.
Try for example to figure out how you write in C the equivalent of
one of the many API examples.
A HUGE difference between linux and windows are the programming
environments. For windows there are many choices.
Many good editors and integrated development environments.
Under linux you basically use gcc and editors like emacs are not
very good compared to windows programming editors for an obvious
commercial reason.
Nevertheless it's possible to create programs for both environments.
In the shade of all this is the macintosh. Though the design of the imac
(visible design) is cool, the machine itselve isn't and is very expensive.
There were linux has the advantage of being cheap, windows of having
everything for a small price, all other OSes are kind of
on the background.
- alpha's are too expensive (so no market)
- macintoshes are too expensive for the cpu power they give
and very little software compared to what we have for windows
- linux is cheap but you cannot sell a linux program, making something
for linux must have other grounds. My ground for example is because
i run now and then myselve linux and because i want an engine that runs
on all systems that have a ansi-c compiler.
- windows software is in theorem expensive
Very important is also compilerspeed. Where people report the alpha compiler
to be excellent, the gcc compiler only since release 2.95 and further has
improved a lot (8% slower still for my DIEP though than msvc 6.0). i don't
have numbers for the g3 and g4.
So basically the most interesting OSes are windows95/98/NT/2000/millennium,
though i heart that first releases of fritz6 don't support windows95 anymore...
Vincent
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