Hot on the heels of Freecell Solver 2.32.0, there's now a 2.32.1 maintenance release available from the download page. This release fixes several important build bugs, especially on Windows, but also on UNIXes.
Please test it to see if any other problems remain.
Freecell Solver version 2.32.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.
This version features a large code cleanup which also resulted in a substantial speed boost. The code cleanup was guided by a script that was written to list all occurrences of identifiers with the same name, in order to find uncommon identifiers.
There were several bug-fixes done to the CMake-based build system, and there's now support for Google's tcmalloc and hidden internal identifiers in the DLL/shared-library. The inline keyword for defining inline functions is now supported on more compilers and more functions or macros have been converted to inline functions.
We hope you enjoy this release.
Freecell Solver version 2.30.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.
This release adds the run-time presets "gooey-unknown-thing", "sand-stone" and "slick-rock" that aim to minimise the average lengths of the resultant solutions. (as opposed to minimising the time it takes to solve). It also adds support for using any of the tree implementation supplied by libavl version 2 for both the positions storage and the stacks storage.
There's a bug fix in the fc-pro range solver for a bug that caused the Freecell Pro compatible moves to be mis-calculated. Moreover, the code has experienced a substantial re-organisation and the Makefiles for the different compiler were merged into one (which was later fixed).
There are also new compile-time options to exclude various functionality that may not be needed.
Download it while its hot!
I've generally been using GCC (= The GNU Compiler Collection) exclusively for compiling Freecell Solver under Linux for its constant development. For a time, I used to compile the Windows binaries using Microsoft Visual C ("cl.exe") and a really hideous batch file I wrote for the purpose (so it would work on the Technion's computers). Lately, however, I've switched to compiling using MinGW on Windows, which is gcc based.
A few weeks ago, I decided to try out other compilers and see what they had to offer. I downloaded the proprietary icc (Intel's C Compiler), which is gcc-compatible and has a Linux trial version. It was a huge download and ended up occupying a lot of space on the hard-disk. At first, I could not get it to emit working code, but after messing a little with my makefiles, I was successful. It is about the same speed as gcc for compiling my ANSI C program (maybe a bit slower), and generates somewhat faster code.
.icc kept emitting many of the so-called "remarks" which I eventually took upon myself to eliminate. This improved the quality of my code. But it worked properly with these many remarks being emitted. After installing icc, msec (the Mandriva security mechanism) complained about world-writable files in the icc installation, so I reported it on the Intel forum.
The next compiler I tried was tcc, the Tiny/Turbo C Compiler. The version in the Mandriva repositories was old and did not yield a working binary, and so I tried upgrading to version 0.9.24 and then to the git version, but none of them worked either. I reported this attempt to the tcc mailing list.
I also tried icc's -fast flag, which is supposed to make the output faster, but it actually made the binaries slower (much slower than even gcc).
However, later on, after cleaning up my makefile, tcc produced perfectly working binaries. I don't know what the problem was, but it was solved. (I reported that in a reply). Compiling with tcc is much faster than with gcc, but the resulting code is much slower than gcc's, and occupies more space on the disk.
The next compiler was TenDRA. Now the homepage a 403 (and still does) and so I went on Freenode and asked. I eventually did:
$ svn co http://svn.tendra.org/trunk/
Only to discover that http://svn.tendra.org/trunk/tendra/INSTALL is empty except for a reference to the Trac web-site (which was also off-line). So I needed to use the guidance of the people from Freenode's #tendra to build it.
In the process, I had to install bmake, because that's the only make that would compile TenDRA. The ./configure in the standard distribution failed to work here, but I was able to find an .src.rpm which compiled and installed fine. The TenDRA boot process also complained about one of my system's header which had a list or enum with a trailing comma, and I had to manually fix the code.
But I was able to build TenDRA and install it, and it was able to compile a working program. Before it did, though, I had to fix many compilation errors it reported, as TenDRA is stricter than gcc. It also didn't recognise my use of strdup, and I had to specify -Ysystem for it to work (the previous -Y's I tried did not work properly). But then it worked.
TenDRA generated larger and slower executables than gcc but it worked.
I failed to get lcc (which isn't strictly open source ) and pcc (which is open source ) to either compile or produce working code. Seems like neither of them are ready for prime time - at least not here on Mandriva Linux Cooker.
So after a lot of frustration, my experiments with different compilers were mostly successful. As a result, my code is more strict, and better tested. So I guess it was worth it.
Freecell Solver version 2.28.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.
This version contains several significant optimisations. Now the "freecell-only" preset can solve the first 32,000 Microsoft Freecell deals at 286 deals per second with gcc, and 301 deals per seconds with Intel's icc. (on a Pentium 4 2.4GHz computer). There are many other internal cleanups, build system tweaks, and new makefiles to build using some alternative C compilers.
The source archives from now on will be distributed as tar.bz2 instead of tar.gz which gives better compression, and a faster download.
Freecell Solver version 2.26.0 has been released It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.
This version contains several significant optimisations (up to the point where the "freecell-only" preset can solve the first 32,000 Microsoft Freecell deals in 200 deals per second.), and improvements to the build system (including the elimination of compiler warnings). Finally, the test suite now builds correctly inside the source distribution.
We have more ideas for optimisations and other enhancements, and this is just an intermediate release (but one which should be perfectly usable).
Freecell Solver version 2.24.0 was released today. It is available in a source archive from the download page. Windows command-line binaries should be available momentarily.
This version contains some fixes to crashes and memory leaks when using the -opt with a range of boards (or otherwise when a solver instance is recycled), a new "freecell-solver-fc-pro-range-solve" executable (built by default, but not installed), which runs a range of deals using the solver and outputs the number of FCS moves, the number of FC-Pro moves, and the FC-Pro moves in standard notation.
For developers, this release also contains a build type for profiling, many cleanups to the code, and a makefile to generate LLVM bitcode.
