[DGD] Where did all the players go?

[bart at wotf.org]

On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 12:29:58 +0100, Felix A. Croes wrote
> bart at wotf.org wrote:
> 
> >[...]
> > In all fairness, unless you have been running a persistent mud for quite a
> > while, or done live database conversions on a running system or such, its very
> > difficult to realize what really needs to happen.
> 
> Sometimes new ideas are simply not accepted.  DGD has had 
> persistance and runtime upgrading for more than 20 years now.  This 
> doesn't fit into the LPmud view, and probably never will.

I'm not sure this is limited to lpmud either. Explaining the process of
in-place recompilation and online data migration often results in a blank
stare. But then, those tend to be people who don't have the need or desire to
do live upgrades without downtime. And in all fairness, often accepting just a
few minutes of downtime makes life a lot easier, and in many cases is
completely acceptable. 

Regardless, even when accepting some downtime, persistent data has to be
migrated/converted to match the new code. This is easier to imagine when that
data is stored in something which people recognize as a 'database', difficult
with something like DGD which is compiler, VM and object database all at the
same time.

To me, the runtime environment which comes closest in concept is that of
Smalltalk V, and a (toy) Vm created by one of my friends (curious guy... he
found writing his own VM easier than trying to figure out lpmuds in general,
and dgd in particular... of course he is now kinda stuck implementing a
compiler... but thats another story)

While at the time I did get quite a few people to look at DGD with the
gurbalib project, and while that lib is at least capable of running a
persistent server, oftentimes when I asked about how to deal with a specific
suggested change to internal data or such, the simple answer was "oh, I'll
just reboot". Somewhat understandable when not running a live game, but, that
never gets one the experience needed for running a persistent server, let
alone a persistent mud.

Bart

> 
> Regards,
> Felix Croes
> ____________________________________________
> https://mail.dworkin.nl/mailman/listinfo/dgd


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