When I started chess programming I was coupling my chess logic with a GUI so I finally had a chess program but not an engine. Only humans could play it through a GUI interface.
This is of course not the way to do it and I then came up with a real engine, nevertheless the GUI part was also fun to write. This comes mainly from the fact that if you write some code you see an improvement of your work right away. You don't have to throw away complete git branches because the changes did work but not improve the engine. My last post about changing the pawn structure evaluation is such an example.
So while my computer is blocked anyway I decided to do a little bit of GUI programming. I spent some time to find the right programming language. All my later stuff was written in C++ with Visual Studio. It has the MFC framework but I got some advice not to use it. So finally I decided to give Lazarus (Free Pascal) another shot. It has a nice coupling of presentation and programming logic and wraps some of the nasty low level stuff very nicely.
A few days later now I have my first GUI prototype. It is already capable to run fixed depth matches between two engines and display their moves on the screen. Even if this probably sounds simple it took already quiet some code to get to this point.
So next on the list is an improvement of the tournament logic e.g. some real tournament time control stuff.
