recursive and iterative search

[Rein Halbersma]

The developers of the Clang C/C++ compiler are talking about ways to let the compiler automatically transform recursive functions into iterative versions with explicit stack manipulation http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.comp ... evel/81848

Their idea is that the iterative form will open up a lot of compiler optimizations that cannot be applied in recursive form. Sounds like an interesting development to experiment with once this starts appearing in their nightly builds at http://llvm.org/apt/

[Aleks Peshkov]

About 10 years ago GCC with explicit extra memory limits for function inlining converted my recursive simple alpha-beta chess program into a single piece of code without any function calls at all.

[Rein Halbersma]

About 10 years ago GCC with explicit extra memory limits for function inlining converted my recursive simple alpha-beta chess program into a single piece of code without any function calls at all.

No doubt automatic recursive-to-iterative transformations have been possible for a long time. But I would like to see if the Clang type of reductions would allow optimization of say IID and LMR, e.g. to eliminate the common move generation of successive searches.

[hgm]

Of course a proper implementation of these concepts would not involve such a duplicate effort in the first place. There was a reasn it was called iterative deepening rather than recursive deepening...