chess
v3.2.0 GrowingThis is a fast chess move generator. It has a very good set of documentation, so you should take advantage of that. It (now) generates all lookup tabels with a build.rs file, which means that very little pseudo-legal move generation requires branching. There are some convenience functions that are exposed to, for example, find all the squares between two squares. This uses a copy-on-make style structure, and the Board structure is as slimmed down as possible to reduce the cost of copying the board. There are places to improve perft-test performance further, but I instead opt to be more feature-complete to make it useful in real applications. For example, I generate both a hash of the board and a pawn-hash of the board for use in evaluation lookup tables (using Zobrist hashing). There are two ways to generate moves, one is faster, the other has more features that will be useful if making a chess engine. See the documentation for more details.
Quick Verdict
- โNot updated for 5+ years
- โStable API (3.x for 9+ years)
- โTrusted by 188 crates
- โPermissive license (MIT)
Security
Deep Insights
4.8K downloads in the last 30 days (159/day), up 28% from the previous period.
188 crates depend on chess. Reasonable ecosystem adoption, though not yet a core dependency.
The API has been stable (1.x) for over 9 years with 36 releases. This level of maturity means you can depend on it without worrying about breaking changes.
At 45KB, chess is lightweight. Small crate size correlates with focused, well-scoped functionality.
Notable dependents include vampirc-uci, chess_perft, offline-chess-puzzles, board-game, bughouse. When high-quality crates choose chess, it's a strong quality signal.
Health Breakdown
Recency, release consistency, active ratio
Yanked ratio, deps, size, maturity, features
Reverse deps, ownership, ecosystem
Downloads, momentum, growth trend
Docs, repo, license, metadata