David Heffernan

In that case why convert to bytes? Not sure why we are guessing. Perhaps @karl Jonson might like to contribute.

If it's a byte array, why don't you just write that to file? Why do you need to convert it to a string variable?

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When you do this, you find that your code is around more than 10 times slower than even the slowest versions in the benchmark, and that's before we've added code to handle errors which is currently missing from your code.

This is not something we should be happy about though. The compiler should be doing this for us.

Define "best". Starting with deciding which encoding to use.

Measure your program and find out. If all you do is micro benchmarks then likely all you will achieve is to make your code harder to read and develop, and your program runs no faster. Do you know where the bottlenecks are in your program?

Is this code a bottleneck in your program? If not write it in the way that is easiest to read. How many times have I said that to you? Why would you choose to make your code hard to read for no benefit?

DeepBlue is old news. Things have moved on. Stockfish is king these days.

You can extend my benchmark program in earlier posts to see how it performs.

This code is very easy to verify that it is safe. For more complex code, that may not be the case, and so pointers could be risky. I was using pointers here for performance reasons. Copy a bunch of characters in one go rather than character by character. Others showed much better ways to do it than my initial attempt.

Blitz ELO of <1500 suggests that no, it does not play good chess CCRL Blitz - Index (computerchess.org.uk)

Can it play chess well? Or is it interesting because it's Pascal?

This seems like choosing a library, and then trying to work out how to fit that library to the problem. That's the wrong way round. One should first understand the problem space, its requirements and constraints, and then find the best solution. Problem first, then solution. Not the other way round.

OpenGL doesn't seem like an obvious choice for 2D graphics on Windows.