Re: Looking into creating a Native Client port of GnuChess

[Simon Waters]

On 25/02/11 14:37, Matthew Ball wrote:
> 
> I wanted to let you all know that I've created a clone of GnuChess 5.08
> on github (see https://github.com/heisencoder/gnuchess) and am
> investigating the feasibility of porting this program to Native Client
> (see http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient), or NaCl for short.

Thanks for letting us know.

I don't think there is a lot of dependency on file I/O in the GNU Chess
5.08 code base. Opening book code is the main one (which for most
opponents can simply be omitted - which you can find in the code as
there is a "book off" option that uses a flag throughout to do the right
thing).

We have moved our attention to a code base derived from Fabien's Fruit
chess engine.

You probably want to focus on the Winboard/Xboard chess interface aspect
as in that mode the code should flush standard out, and talk a
(reasonably) well defined chess language which would make using the JS
front end with other chess engines in future a lot easier.

Main dependency headache I can imagine is the code using threading for
move input. You can probably find the version before that in the
changelog, but a lot of changes have happened since that was
implemented, but it might be side-steppable if that is an issue.

 Simon