THC stands for "Triplehappy Chess". Triplehappy is a former company name, and still exists as triplehappy.com, a website hosting my chess projects. THC the library is a C++ implementation of the rules of standard chess. It is intended to provide a convenient API for different types of C++ chess programs (engines, GUIs, utilities, you name it). THC used to take the form of a bunch of C++ files that needed to be gathered into a library, but C++ libraries are a bit awkward, so it now takes the form of just two C++ files, thc.cpp and thc.h with no further dependencies.
I have had quite a lot of correspondence from people who have had various problems getting started with THC, so I have simplified the process as much as possible - and it's now really simple! You don't have to worry about how THC is put together and tested. You just need to grab two files thc.cpp (a C++ file) and thc.h (a C++ include file) and add them into your project (irrespective of your OS, IDE compiler whatever - they're just simple, standard portable C++).
To illustrate the process, I've introduced the new demonstration program called demo.cpp. This is a kind of 'Hello World' program for THC. Just build a program that compiles and links the two C++ files demo.cpp and thc.cpp together. I've included a Visual C++ 2017 solution and project but really any C++ development system should work fine. More recently I added the simplest possible bash build script to build the demo on Linux. (I also updated the Visual C++ project file to 2019, this mainly changed the platform toolset from v141 to v142).
The demo.cpp program is simple and self-explanatory, and by looking at it and getting it going you will see the sort of things you can do with THC. It might be a good idea to keep demo.cpp as the main() file in your project (rename it to something else) and then to progressively replace it with the functionality you want to build.
I should mention that there's now a supplement to the Demo program I described in Getting started. It's called RebuildAndTest. You use it to, well, rebuild and test thc.c and thc.h. In this sense 'rebuild' means to pull the components of thc.c and thc.h together, and 'test' is just some rudimentary testing that I should extend, for example with perft (see github.com Issues for the repository - the good news is that tch-chess-library does pass this standard test!).
You can still ignore Rebuild and Test if you just want to quickly get started, but this is a good place to go if you want to get into the weeds a little further. Just as for the Demo program, there are Visual C++ 2019 files for building RebuildAndTest and a rudimentary Linux build script as well. This time there are three C++ files to compile and link - test-framework.cpp, thc.cpp and util.cpp.
This is a general purpose chess library for C++. It provides clients with simple facilities for creating and manipulating chess positions and moves in accordance with the rules of standard chess.
- Import/export positions using FEN (Forsyth Edwards Notation)
- Import/export moves using SAN (Standard algebraic notation)
- Generate legal move list, understands all chess rules
- Make moves in positions, push and pop moves in positions
- Evaluate positions for mate and all draw rules
- Compress positions
- Generate fast position hash codes move by move.
- Fast operation using lookup tables, efficient data structures
In December 2020 I (finally) got all my GitHub chess projects properly aligned.
- THC, a C++ implementation of the rules of chess (this project)
- Tarrasch Chess GUI, My main project, a chess workbench
- Sargon 1978, porting the original classic Z80 program to work as a UCI engine
- Tarrasch Toy Engine, a simple original UCI engine
The idea is that project thc will deliver a simple pair of C++ file thc.cpp and thc.h which implement the rules of chess for the other three projects. Finally, thc.cpp and thc.h are the same for all three projects! (at least on December 2nd 2020).
Everything that follows is a little tired and out of date, I will leave it in for now but I should rewrite, reorganise somewhat.
This repository serves as the genesis of the files src/thc.cpp and src/thc.h in the peer repository tarrasch-chess-gui. Those files serve as a bedrock chess API for the program Tarrasch Chess GUI. Those two files are basically a concatenation of the files present in this library. The idea for that was inspired by SQLite, which is similarly distributed as single concatenated .c and .h files to avoid the pain point of integrating a library into a project.
This repository has recently been brought up to date with its peer tarrasch-chess-gui repository. It is easier to understand the more granular presentation of the code in this repository. I used to say One day it would be nice to add a python script or similar to this repository to automatically regenerate the concatenated two file version of the library. I can now (August 7th 2019) say that this has been successfully implemented with a new program test-framework.cpp. This should make it practical to keep the repositories in sync from now on.
This code was written as part of the Tarrasch Chess GUI [see peer repository/(ies)]. At a certain point it seemed sensible to break the Chess API out into a library. After some experience with using a thc.lib / thc.a static library with Visual Studio/Windows and XCode/Mac I have reluctantly concluded that libraries can be very annoying and I now use a slightly different mechanism; I concatenate the modules together and provide a single thc.cpp and thc.h file to include in any project in the simplest possible way. This idea was inspired by SQLite3 which does the same thing. The thc.cpp and thc.h files are in the source directory, and they are the only files you need EXCEPT, unfortunately DebugPrintf.h and Portability.h, which are Tarrasch Chess GUI files and are also needed just at the moment. The presence of DebugPrintf.h requires that the user contribute a DebugPrintfInner() or similar function.
If you instead use CMake as a build system, you may prefer adding the library to your project
as a CMake submodule. CMakeLists.txt provides the variable THC_CHESS_INCLUDE for the headers
include directory and the libraries thc_chess (shared) and thc_chess_static (static).
Usage example:
add_subdirectory("${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/path/to/library" EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL)
include_directories(${THC_CHESS_INCLUDE})
target_link_libraries(your_binary_name thc_chess_static) # or thc_chess for dynamic linkingI would like to do a bit of a renaming exercise - I am moving away from "using" and prefer explicit use of namespaces. All the thc library code is in namespace thc, so thc::position for example would be more logical than thc::ChessPosition (note thc = triple happy chess, where triple happy comes from triplehappy.com, a domain I use).
An annoying thing is that all the code in this repository seems to have reverted to Windows CR/LF endings despite me carefully standardising on LF only. I need to sort this out. I blame (possibly unfairly) GitHub.
Although you won't find much test code (yet), the code is battle proven from years of use and incremental improvement inside the Tarrasch Chess GUI project.
Bill Forster billforsternz@gmail.com 25Mar2014, updated 2Dec2020