[DGD] Hydra

[Pär Winzell]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2018 at 3:22 PM Felix A. Croes <felix at dworkin.nl> wrote:

> I have been working on DGD since 1992, and on Hydra since 2002.  Although
> DGD muds peaked around 2005, I think there is still a case for LPC as a
> programming language, for error handling with atomic functions, for the
> event-driven model (it has been fun to watch the node.js folks rediscover
> old LPmud wisdom), and for object-oriented database management systems.
> So I continued developing DGD as a hobby after it stopped being my day
> job.
>

Meanwhile, in my 26-year programming career since 1992, I don't believe I
have ever come across a more cohesively designed and competently engineered
piece of software.

I have also witnessed the entire field of software engineering (or at least
the parts with which I've had incidental contact) miss the boat on the
fundamental premise of on-disk state. While games are only one of Hydra's
applications, they are vividly illustrative ones, and highly relevant for
the billions of dollars being poured (often naively) into online social
virtual reality worlds.

The technical constraint of explicit persistence turns invariably into a
shallow design mentality. Everything exciting becomes transient, and any
feature with really lasting impact on the world becomes costly and
error-prone.

But you all know this. I'm preaching to the choir.

Since testing on a 10 year old system is hardly definitive, I want to ask
>
for volunteers to test Hydra on such modern systems as they have available.
> The test should be run on bare hardware.  Running it virtualized slows down
> Hydra a lot, and is also likely to have a large impact on other VMs running
> on the same hardware.
>

Hmm. This is tricky. I have access to some fairly powerful machines now --
but they all, without exception, run under some kind of hypervisor. I'll
ask around some.

Zell