[DGD] Hydra

[Felix A. Croes]

Par Winzell <par.winzell at alyx.com> wrote:

>[...]
> 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.

Thanks for the vote of confidence :)  Perhaps DGD and Hydra will be useful
in some future endeavours.


> 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.

Even among DGD users, persistence was practised by a minority and only
a few took it as far as Skotos did.  Their loss, of course.


>[...]
> 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.

Hydra can run on virtualized hardware, but this test would be severely
affected.  Especially the double whammy of Meltdown mitigation at both the
OS and hypervisor level.

Regards,
Felix Croes