[DGD] DGD/MP 1.0

[Felix A. Croes]

I've just put together a version of DGD/MP which I'll call 1.0.  It has
working MP support :-)  Though I still have a lot of debugging to do and
disabled subsystems to complete.  The mostly-bugfree version will be 1.1,
and 1.2 will run on platforms other than a Mac.  1.2 will be the first
version I am going to release, which should be in a few months.  After
that, I intend that both DGD and DGD/MP advance to version 1.3
simultaneously.

I've been planning to create a MP capable version of DGD for a long
time; since 1997, in fact.  Many other features came first (parse_string,
private inheritance, nil, atomic functions, light-weight objects,
arbitrary size numbers with crypto, call_touch, IPv6 support...)  At this
point, DGD finally has everything I wanted it to have 10 years ago.

Implementing multi-processor support has taken me a lot more time and
effort than I thought it would.  I've found that doing MP properly is
hard.  Very, very hard.  It's so easy to overlook something and make it
merely multi-threaded, with all threads depending on some bottleneck,
and without properly utilizing all processors.

It's going to take still more time to tune things properly for an actual
mudlib designed for MP.  Most of that will happen after version 1.3.

Anyway, the first milestone has been reached.

Regards,
Dworkin