Chal v1.4.0 release

[namanthanki]

Hi all, I've just tagged v1.4.0 of Chal, a compact UCI engine written in C99.

This release marks something of a milestone and an honest reflection point. Chal has now reached approx. 2650ELO compared to previous release it gained about ~150 ELO.

For context: Fruit 2.1 is ~8,000 lines of C++, comments excluded. Chal sits at under 1,000 lines of C99, comments excluded. Matching it, even approximately, while staying within that constraint felt worth noting.

The gains in this release came almost entirely from rewriting the search stack and speed optimizations over the past few development weeks. No new evaluation terms, just squeezing more out of what's already there.

That said I'll be candid - I think I've hit a ceiling with the current architecture. The engine is deliberately simple and highly readable, and that comes with a performance cost that pure optimization can only partially offset. There's not much more juice left to extract without compromising the core design goals and staying purely HCE, staying under 1k lines, and staying readable.

It's a strange mix of feelings: some disappointment at hitting the wall earlier than I hoped, and some satisfaction at making it this far under these constraints.

The goal was never to build the strongest engine. It was to see how far a clean, minimal, human-readable HCE engine could go. I think this release is a reasonable answer to that question.

GitHub: https://github.com/namanthanki/chal/releases/tag/1.4.0