[DGD] A simple lib

[Noah Gibbs]

  This is old, but I meant to reply.

--- Robert Forshaw <iouswuoibev at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I was most detered from the kernel lib because
> it looked like it would 
> consume too much resources. My MUD will be
> making heavy use of very short 
> (milisecond) callouts and I don't want it
> lagging because the resource 
> manager itself is hogging the CPU. Am I wrong
> in this assessment?

  Possibly.  I've never had any performance problems
with it, but I'm also doing something that acts a lot
like a regular MUD.  Since a regular MUD uses an order
of magnitude less CPU than a modern desktop machine
provides (if that!), the small amount of waste that
the Kernel Library involves is simply not an issue.

  If you're going to do something that requires nearly
your entire CPU load, and you're going to do it in
tiny amounts at millisecond precision, then security
and sanity-checking both need to go.  They're too
expensive.  So you can write a less-secure and
less-debuggable version than the Kernel, which will be
faster.

  Of course, if you're doing something that
performance-intensive and precise, why are you using
LPC?

> Could someone explain to me what a 'tick' is
> exactly? Is it anything like a 
> cycle?

  Very much like that.  But remember that DGD runs on
a number of different types of hardware, so using
ticks or milliseconds would make portability
difficult.  Your application would behave very
differently, and require different quotas, on
different machines.  Not good.  A tick is a
hardware-independent abstraction of processor usage. 
It's not perfect, but it works quite decently in every
case I've seen.

> It isn't listed in the DGD terms 

  Fixed.


=====
------
noah_gibbs at yahoo.com

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