Juicer

Hyper-Performant Chess Move Generator

A high-performance chess move generator in C++, using magic bitboards for fast legal move enumeration.

C++ iconC++ Make Game Dev

Links: GitHub

Overview

Juicer is a chess move generator focused on raw performance. It generates all legal moves for any given board position using bitboard representations and precomputed attack tables.

Technical Approach

  • Bitboards: 64-bit integers represent piece positions, enabling fast bitwise operations for move generation
  • Magic bitboards: Precomputed lookup tables for sliding piece (rook, bishop, queen) attacks
  • Perft testing: Move generation correctness verified against known perft results at various depths

Performance

Move generation is the foundation of any chess engine. Juicer prioritizes speed to enable deeper search in engine development.

What I Learned

  • Low-level optimization techniques in C++
  • Bitwise operations for game state representation
  • The importance of cache-friendly data structures