[Openmcl-devel] RUN-PROGRAM and CPU usage

[Tord Kallqvist Romstad]

Hello,

I am the author of Gothmog, one of the strongest free chess engines
available for OS X.  The engine itself is a console application
written in C.  I have now started writing a Lisp library to help me in
the development of the engine, by automating tasks like running
matches between different versions, running test suites and doing
statistical analysis of the results.  If the OpenMCL Cocoa bindings
are sufficiently mature, I also hope to eventually use my library as a
basis for a Cocoa GUI for my chess engine.

My first problem is to make the communication between OpenMCL and the
engine work.  I thought this would be quite simple, and that the
RUN-PROGRAM function would do the trick:

(defun start-engine ()
  (run-program *engine-path* nil 
               :output :stream 
               :input :stream
               :wait nil))

This works fine, except for the problem that OpenMCL's CPU usage
immediately jumps through the roof.  Is there any way to prevent this
from happening?  If not, is there something else than RUN-PROGRAM
which is likely to work better?

-- 
Tord Romstad