Re: [gnugo-devel] Parallelizing GNU Go

[Paul Pogonyshev]

just a question: do we really need it to be paralleled?

personally i won't say so, because:

- gnu go is a user-targeted program that is not supposed to be run
  on supercomputers. it must be able to run on all but really outdated
  machines in fact. so, paralleling it is a bit off goal.

- gnu go is very time consuming, meaning that speed is our second
  priority after engine strength. making it threaded would certainly
  slow it down on all machines but that little fraction enjoying
  multiple cpus.

- making it heavily threaded would mean hell of changes in code, worse
  maintainability (hi Gunnar ;), headache of crawling-out-of-nowhere-bugs
  and very difficult debugging.

- it will just make coding more difficult (e.g. i assume we'll have to
  clone board[] and many other static arrays and variables for every
  thread).

so, if you ask me, i'm against this. forking gnugo is another deal since
it doesn't touch the engine much (if at all). it's not very portable, but
i don't think you'll find many users out there who are eager to have
paralleled gnu go at all.

just my 2 cents.

Paul