How To: Using the C interface to the Gothello daemon
Bart Massey 2001/11/26

The C client "library" for the Gothello daemon is a standard
C module including .c and .h files.  You will want to
include gthclient.h in your C or C++ program, and link
against gthclient.o.  The provided gthclient.o is for an x86
Linux system with ancient libraries: you will probably want
to recompile gthclient.c for your environment before use.

If you're using C++, don't forget that you need to do
choose exactly one of the following two options:
1) Compile gthclient.c with the C++ compiler
2) Compile gthclient.c with the C compiler, then include
   gthclient.h using the extern syntax, i.e.
     extern "C" {
     #include "gthclient.h"
     }
Failure to do one of these (or doing both) will lead to
confusing error messages.

In brief, the client stubs are used by calling
gth_start_game() which automatically connects to the
specified server on the specified host as the specified
player.  (See the documentation on running a Gothello game
for details.)  The code then handles the details of making
moves and getting moves from the server, using the
gth_make_move() and gth_get_move() functions.  These accept
and return move strings: be careful, as there are a couple
of bits of funny business here.  First, a pass is
represented as ".p" on input and output.  Second, the string
returned by gth_get_move() is simply written into the given
pointer: it needs to be pointing at 3 or more writable bytes
(2 for the string plus 1 for the null terminator) or you are
likely to trash memory.

Time control tracking is performed by the client,
which caches a bunch of state information about the game
in progress in global variables.

There is a manual page available in a variety of formats in
the man subdirectory of this directory.  Note that the gthclient
code is essentially untested, and I currently have no client
with which to exercise it.  There are likely to be bugs for
a bit, until I have remedied this situation.

Let me know if there are questions or bugs.