TalkChess.com

[H.G.Muller]

Well, there sure is a lot of overlap in the things SCID and XBoard do. Like displaying the Chess board, parsing PGN files, etc. But all that stuff already exists for both.

The internal workings of SCID and XBoard are completely different, and not easily combined. The front-end is based on a completely different widget set, (Tcl/Tk for SCID, Xaw/X11 for XBoard), so we could not use each other's front-end code even if we wanted to do exactly the same thing.

For the back-end I could not use SCID's database code, because that is all written to use SCID's native database format, which is limited to Chess. So it could not handle Gothic Chess or Xiangqi, making it unacceptable for XBoard, while extending it so that it could handle these, would decrease the efficiency for Chess (e.g. by doubling all file sizes) in a way that is unacceptable to SCID.

So I think that at the stage of development both programs are now, it would be very difficult to combine them or share code, and even more diffiicukt to benefit from that in any way. But the original reason for putting the Swiss pairing functionality in a separate, independent program was an attempt to make it better sharable by different GUIs. E.g. if SCID wanted to implement Swiss, it could use the pairing engine, and wouldn't have to bother about making the pairing itself. And that improving the pairing engine, would improve the quality of Swiss on all GUIs using it. But I think the idea is still-born: GUI programmers would rather die than use an existing external component.