From: Zach Tellman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
There are few languages other than these that offer reasonable
performance, not worse than 2X slower than C, but they tend to be
memory hogs. Java is one of them. I cannot imagine ever seeing a top
chess program written in Java, or anything that is really memory
intensive as good GO program tend to be. Is any of the 2200+ GO
programs on CGOS written in anything other than C?
> To be fair, I did write an early version of Ergo in OCaml, and it was equally
> fast and arguably
> quite a bit cleaner. I returned to C++ because an OCaml library would be
> useful to probably no
> one but myself. So if you want to release something to the public, I agree
> that C/C++ is the way
> to go. Other than that, I don't think that computer go development has been
> extensive enough to
> argue that it's spanned all possible approaches.
If an OCaml Go program were plug-n-play (like Mark Boon's efforts with Java)
and competitive with the rest of the field, it might encourage more people to
explore OCaml. Installing OCaml is no great barrier.
C/C++, though popular, constrains the kinds of Go programs which can be
explored. ( OCaml and C++ might be equivalent in a theoretical sense, but
writing a good OCaml engine in C++ could conceivably slow down the process a
tad. ) Other languages might encourage exploration of other interesting byways.
As you say, we probably have not yet explored all possible approaches.
Some language may make it easy to encapsulate information gleaned during local
searches into a kind of "short term memory" and exploit that to speed up
evaluation of many branches of the search tree. Who knows? We have a long way
to go before playing at the pro level on a 19x19 board.
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