Ideas of engines written in C#

[Peperoni]

Do you guys know if some serious chess engines have been written in C#?

[mig2004]

Perhaps you might want to read this: https://tearth.dev/posts/performance-of ... rp-part-1/

[emadsen]

I don't know your definition of "serious" but here's mine. MadChess is roughly 2700 Elo.

Blog
Source Code

[Peperoni]

I don't know your definition of "serious" but here's mine. MadChess is roughly 2700 Elo.

Blog
Source Code

Very nice If I wanted to adapt it for .NET 4 , do you think that would be a lot of work?

[emadsen]

If I wanted to adapt it for .NET 4 , do you think that would be a lot of work?

I don't think so. It has no significant NuGet package dependencies other than for unit tests. I don't believe it references many .NET 7 specific APIs. Perhaps you'll have difficulties with the System.Numerics namespace. I don't know. I haven't written .NET 4 code in years.

Why would you want to backport the code to a 13 year old runtime?

[dangi12012]

One of the best ones : https://github.com/lithander/Leorik

You dont need to think about the API. Microsoft consolidated .net .net core and .net framework into .net standard which is basically backwards compatible. So most of .net 8 (the one from 2023) is the same code as .net framework 4.0 (barring all of nuget)
If you need to run it on windows 98 (for whatever reason) you need .net framework 2
For windows XP you can go .net framework 4

Recommendation: just go with .net 8 and be done with it. It runs of your phone too etc.

Rant about JIT:
Too bad the promise of more performance compared to C++ never materialized. Since all JIT could compile at runtime like march=native which shipped binaries cannot do.
Or compiling a startup settings file at runtime. (c++ can only ever be a const variable x) but C# can compile it as the constant "3" etc..
Its not even a fault of the language - but the MSIL optimizer is not where it could be in theory.

[JoAnnP38]

One of the best ones : https://github.com/lithander/Leorik

Recommendation: just go with .net 8 and be done with it. It runs of your phone too etc.

+1 and +1

[Peperoni]

If I wanted to adapt it for .NET 4 , do you think that would be a lot of work?

I don't think so. It has no significant NuGet package dependencies other than for unit tests. I don't believe it references many .NET 7 specific APIs. Perhaps you'll have difficulties with the System.Numerics namespace. I don't know. I haven't written .NET 4 code in years.

Why would you want to backport the code to a 13 year old runtime?

Thank you Because I want to use it with the Unity engine, which is super limited about that : https://docs.unity3d.com/2023.2/Documen ... pport.html

[emadsen]

Oh, you mean .NET Framework 4.8 not .NET Framework 4. Big difference.

I don't understand what you mean by Unity being "super limited". The Unity documentation you linked to says it supports .NET Standard 2.1. So target that. I don't see any reason to limit the runtime to .NET Framework 4.8.

[dangi12012]

.NET Standard 2.1 is the interface
So you can literally pick any modern framework