BitsChess

BitsChess is a chess library written in Rust. It was mainly written for the chess engine GiffiBot which i'm currently working on, but BitsChess is open for everybody to use under the MIT license.
Behind the scenes BitsChess uses bitboards for board representation. Attack, check, pin -masks and magic bitboards for move generation.

Using in a project

Cargo.toml

Add BitsChess as a dependency into a Cargo.toml

[dependencies]
bitschess = { git = "https://github.com/miklaskarjalainen/BitsChess.git" }

Using the library

A simple example of using the BitsChess library

use bitschess::Move;
use bitschess::prelude::*;

fn main()  {
    // Creating a board
    let mut board = ChessBoard::new();
    board.parse_fen(STARTPOS_FEN).expect("valid fen");

    // Making moves from uci commands
    board.make_move_uci("e2e4").unwrap();
    board.make_move_uci("a7a5").unwrap();
    board.make_move_uci("e4e5").unwrap();
    board.make_move_uci("d7d5").unwrap();
    board.make_move_uci("e5d6").unwrap(); // en passant
    board.make_move_uci("a5a4").unwrap();
    board.make_move_uci("d6e7").unwrap();
    board.make_move_uci("a4a3").unwrap();
    board.make_move_uci("e7f8r").unwrap(); // promote pawn to a rook

    let legal_moves_uci: Vec<String> = board.get_legal_moves().into_iter().map(|m: Move| {
        m.to_uci()
    }).collect();
    

    println!("{}", board);
    println!("------------------------");
    println!("Legal Moves: {:?}", legal_moves_uci);
}

Compiling as binary

BitsChess can be compiled as a binary, and it has a very primitive CLI which is mainly there for development purposes.

git clone https://github.com/miklaskarjalainen/BitsChess
cd BitsChess
cargo build --bin bitschess-bin # add '--release' for optimized builds

For the cli commands have look at main.rs they are all in there. They all are subject for change and is the reason they are not listed here (yet).

Testing

The repository contains unit tests which can be ran with the command:

cargo test # add '--release' for optimized builds

Sources

Sources for the content which helped me to develop this chess library!

https://www.chessprogramming.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4ogK0MIzqk
https://www.youtube.com/@chessprogramming591