Rebel to be reacquired by Ed

[Sean Evans]

Hi, It would nice to see Rebel reacquired and turned into a UCI, Android and iOS compatible program. The ELO does not have to be improved, just allow people to download and add it to their collection.

Thank you,

Sean

[hgm]

The whole concept of an engine is incompatible with iOS, isn't it?

[AdminX]

The whole concept of an engine is incompatible with iOS, isn't it?

Seems so.

[Sean Evans]

The whole concept of an engine is incompatible with iOS, isn't it?

Why?

[hgm]

iOS does not allow one process to launch another process. So it is impossible for a GUI to fire up an engine. Both the GUI and the engine would have to be the same executable. And if you want to play engine A against engine B then A, B and the GUI would all have to be in a single executable.

[rabbits23]

This might help.
Allan
http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/e/execfile.htm

[royb]

iOS does not allow one process to launch another process. So it is impossible for a GUI to fire up an engine. Both the GUI and the engine would have to be the same executable. And if you want to play engine A against engine B then A, B and the GUI would all have to be in a single executable.

That makes me wonder why IOS has this restriction. Is it simply a matter of policy that they don't allow this? In which case, rooting the device might allow it? Or is it matter of design that Apple deliberately chose? If that is the case, it begs the question of why they designed it that way?

[bob]

iOS does not allow one process to launch another process. So it is impossible for a GUI to fire up an engine. Both the GUI and the engine would have to be the same executable. And if you want to play engine A against engine B then A, B and the GUI would all have to be in a single executable.

That makes me wonder why IOS has this restriction. Is it simply a matter of policy that they don't allow this? In which case, rooting the device might allow it? Or is it matter of design that Apple deliberately chose? If that is the case, it begs the question of why they designed it that way?

Main reason, it keeps their thumb on everything. It is incredibly useful to be able to spawn a process, send it input, receive output from it, etc... And it has only been available in Unix since the 1970 time frame.

[kinderchocolate]

iOS does not allow one process to launch another process. So it is impossible for a GUI to fire up an engine. Both the GUI and the engine would have to be the same executable. And if you want to play engine A against engine B then A, B and the GUI would all have to be in a single executable.

That makes me wonder why IOS has this restriction. Is it simply a matter of policy that they don't allow this? In which case, rooting the device might allow it? Or is it matter of design that Apple deliberately chose? If that is the case, it begs the question of why they designed it that way?

Roy, that's because there's no reason to spawn multiple processes in a mobile application. It's doggy and insecure. The kernel would need more resources to track the processes. Multi-threading works well. Rooting the device won't help because all the functions for spawning a process in the SDK have empty implementation. We can still call those functions, but they will return immediately and do nothing.

Therefore, all the unix functions able to spawn a process gets implemented in iOS like this:

void fork()
{
#ifdef IOS
// Empty implementation
#else // Eg: Mac OS-X
.... implementation code ...
#endif
}

Windows Phone is the same.

[AdminX]

iOS does not allow one process to launch another process. So it is impossible for a GUI to fire up an engine. Both the GUI and the engine would have to be the same executable. And if you want to play engine A against engine B then A, B and the GUI would all have to be in a single executable.

That makes me wonder why IOS has this restriction. Is it simply a matter of policy that they don't allow this? In which case, rooting the device might allow it? Or is it matter of design that Apple deliberately chose? If that is the case, it begs the question of why they designed it that way?

Windows Phone is the same.

Now that I did not know. Been many years ago when I last used one.