Chess engine input handling

When designing the ice engine I decided to design it as a single threaded program to save the thread handling overhead.

In the pascal mace engine I use threads for the input handling. I read from stdin, when no input is available the execution stops. This is unfortunate if this is your main thread, it is no problem when it is an extra thread created just for that purpose. In ice I wanted to use PEEK_NAMED_PIPE to look whether input is available and only start reading if it signals that input is there, so the execution is not blocked by reading from an empty input device.

It worked most of the time, it failed when I gave the console window, where the engine is running in, focus or removed focus. Although I specified that I don't want to have window events PEEK_NAMED_PIPE returned true in those cases, it tried then to read from stdin and execution stopped as no real input was available.

This only happens when I run the engine in a console window not when the engine is running as a process started by the GUI (try to give focus to a process ...) but it is annoying anyway.

I returned to the thread method for handling stdin input. I use the standard methods from Windows to do that and the performance hit I'm taking seems minimal.