Pros and Cons of MS Visual C++ 2010 Express

Since I was feeling that my Free Pascal based mACE engine executes to slowly I started the iCE engine which is using C++ as programming language. When I came to choose the actual compiler I decided to use MS Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition.

After a few weeks of coding with it here is my very personal opinion about its Pros and Cons

Pros:

1. It's free. (I don't want to spend money for a little spare time project)
2. It has a pleasing ergonomic usage view and feeling. (MS always knew how to make things look nice)
3. It allows a fast start into programming. Just type a little "hello world" program into the editor and click the run button.
4. It has an extremely good on the fly syntax checking, called IntelliSense. While you type your code it checks it for syntax correctness. Things like type mismatches, missing brackets, misspelled type names, missing ; or missing includes are spotted and marked (like in MS Word) while you type. This is really impressing and gives you a huge boost in coding performance. When you build your project your code is already pretty good and your are not flooded with countless error messages because of a missing closing bracket somewhere.
5. It has a powerful integrated debugger, it gives you an auto pane where it automatically displays the variables and values of the just used scope. It is also able to interpret complex statements like (ESquare)((ml->moves[i] & MASK_FROM_SQ) >> SHIFT_FROM_SQ) and it can show you the contents of complex types behind pointers. Free Pascal just showed the memory address of the object which is quite useless and you had to write code to map your objects into local variables as the debugger was not able to display the object directly. 
6. It supports the INTEL inline assembler style, the syntax is a little different from the one in Free Pascal but basically comparable. And you can start a assembler block with a _asm directive and just write assembler code between { }. When you see the GNU compiler assembler mess with assembler statements being C++ strings in an awkward AT&T style you will see what I mean. I would love to see the architectural decision that made the GNU guys decide to use a programming language from a Telco provider rather than from a processor manufacturer.  (I know the -masm=intel option in GNU, but the assembler syntax is still not the same as in Free Pascal or Visual C++).
7. In Warning Level 4 it gives you good hints where you might have coded dirty causing you problems later on. It will spot things like if (value = 0), which is in almost all cases an error or usage of not initialized variables (useful when you have a lot of branches in your code and in one of the branches you access the variable without its initialization first).

This is a long list of Pros, longer than I expected, now to the Cons

1. The Express Edition does not include a code profiler that allows you to find not optimized parts of your code, or just to give you information what code is spend the most time on, so you know where to optimize first. The Professional Edition shall include one (not verified by me) but this edition is not free so for my little non commercial project not affordable.
2. The generated executable includes dependencies on some dll's so they don't run on other computers unless a redistributable framework is installed on them. There might be a code generation option for a runtime library like "Multithreaded-Debug-DLL" where the dependency  might not exist (not tested so far), but the pure existence of a default that generates an executable that does not run on another computer is annoying. 
3. The generated code does not seem to be optimal. I use seem, because I might not have found all tweaks to make it faster. VC++ comes with 2 code generation defaults, a DEBUG Release and a RELEASE release. the RELEASE option generates code that is about twice as fast as the DEBUG option, so I assume a lot of optimization is turned on here. But the resulting code was still much slower than the code generated by my Free Pascal engine. Usually this is not a problem as computers today are so fast they run even unoptimized code fast enough, but when you program a chess engine execution speed is one of your main concerns (and it was the reason to start with a C++ engine at the beginning).

The last Con is real concern to me and for this little chess engine project. When the final code is slow it doesn't matter how nice and painless it was to write it. I decided to test another C++ compiler on my source code just to see whether I made mistakes in porting it from Pascal to C++.

I used g++ (the GNU C++ compiler) on my source. I had to make a few source code adjustemenst (like I defined my own INFINITY constant, VC++ was fine with that, g++ not, even with an own namespace). Most hassle went into the inline assembler functions for bitboard operations (finding the least signinficat bit) which did just not compile in g++ even with -masm=intel. I replaced the assembler code with C++ code like

#ifdef _MSC_VER
    __asm
    {
            ; use bsf to get the least significant bit
    }
#else
      if (B==0) return 64; else return __builtin_ctzll(B);
#endif

So it finally compiled. To my surprise the almost identical source code generated a much faster executable with g++. I did not expect such a huge difference.

Just to give an impression of the difference

VC++:
go depth 11

info depth 10 seldepth 29 time 42125 nodes 7924921 pv b4b7 f7b7 h5g6 h7g6 d8g8 g6f5 g8g4 f5e5 g4h5 f3f5 f2f4 h2f4 h5e2 d1e2 a4e4 d5e4 d3d4  nps 188128 score mate 9 hashfull 190 tbhits 0
 
info depth 11 seldepth 24 time 135391 nodes 38553528 pv b4b7 f7b7 h5g6 h7g6 d8g8 g6f5 g8g4 f5e5 g4h5 f3f5 f2f4 h2f4 h5e2 d1e2 a4e4 d5e4 d3d4  nps 284756 score mate 9 hashfull 132 tbhits 0
bestmove b4b7

g++:
go depth 11

info depth 10 seldepth 29 time 15203 nodes 7924921 pv b4b7 f7b7 h5g6 h7g6 d8g8 g6f5 g8g4 f5e5 g4h5 f3f5 f2f4 h2f4 h5e2 d1e2 a4e4 d5e4 d3d4  nps 521273 score mate 9 hashfull 190 tbhits 0
 
info depth 11 seldepth 24 time 54906 nodes 38553528 pv b4b7 f7b7 h5g6 h7g6 d8g8g6f5 g8g4 f5e5 g4h5 f3f5 f2f4 h2f4 h5e2 d1e2 a4e4 d5e4 d3d4  nps 702173 score mate 9 hashfull 132 tbhits 0
bestmove b4b7


So the g++ code processed 702.173 nodes per second where the VC++ only processed 284.756 nodes.


My personal outcome:
I will continue to write and debug the code with Visual C++ but for the release code generation I will use the GNU compiler instead.