CMcmrdporcupine·Sep 23, 2023
I've done the "whole new thing" before, too. 20ish years ago, tho I only have a few fragments of what I worked on back then: https://github.com/rdaum/mica being one of them I found on an old drive. Not complete.
But sticking with compatibility has allowed me to enforce development discipline, basically. And then I'll move it onwards from there. I have many ideas. And a product concept (if I could find an investor...). But I felt it important to start with a thing with existing foundation and use cases before doing the exciting stuff/changes.
Re: world state / transactions -- yeah, basically all I/O and mutations happen in a transactional context, and then at commit time conflicts are resolved; if they're not resolve-able, the transaction is retried in a new state. As for overhead, yes potentially maybe a lot, but it's also a solvable prob
Read the rest
lem; this is how an MVCC SQL database (like, even Postgres) works. TLDR it's likely inefficient now, but I believe I can make it efficient. And I think it's the best way to solve the shared world state problem and still meet user's expectations of consistency. Original LambdaMOO had a global interpreter lock and only one user was mutating the world at a time, in their given tick slice. Not gonna scale.
Re: the MOO client, it's `rmoo.el`: https://github.com/lisdude/rmoo -- it's been around for a long time (25, 30 years?) and it and/or MOO.el (another emacs one) are how/why I learned emacs in the first place. I had to minor patch my local copy to make it work with emacs 29.1, though I don't know elisp well enough to say whether my patch is the right thing to do or not, so...
EDIT: I just re-read and saw you asked whether each new verb call creates a new state, and actually it's not that. It's each new command or network transaction, which can in fact lead to a chain of verb (method) calls. Recall a MUD has a command loop, so basically a transaction begins at command entry, and commits when all the invoked methods/verbs provoked from that complete.