[MUD-Dev] Persistance/stability

[Miroslav Silovic]

> have to explicitly reset it). When I first joined the first version of
> this list, there was a lot of discussion (like now) with Chris L about
> databases, commits, and lock/lockless stuff, and that just sort of
> re-inforced my notion that other MUDs were persistant languages too.
> It's clear that Diku's aren't, but couldn't we consider MOO's to be?
> How about Mushes? I believe that Mushes don't save over a reboot (?),

MUSHes and MOOs save everything across the reboot. MOOs even save the
active processes (something Cold doesn't do, and I don't know about
MUSH).

> but get the impression that MOO's do. LP's don't, unless explicit
> saving to files is done by LPC code. Am I vaguely correct here? What

I was rather apalled when I first discovered this. Mind you, it's much
easier to implement than total persistance, and sometimes necessary
(if you're doing a server in, say, LISP, you have a nonpersistant
systems with pretty damn good compilers out there that are unable to
save the methods unless you keep track of the source).

> Adam also mentioned that most MUDs don't stay up for more than a week
> or two. That surprises me, too. I would have thought that LambdaMOO
> would have been up for at least months at a time. Given that most don't
> save everything over reboots, that sort of corrupts the impression of
> a real "world", doesn't it?

In fact, even if a MUD is up for only a week at the time, 'everything
gets reset in 5 minutes' breaks a spell for me.

Unfortunately the only mainstream programming langauge with full persistance
of both objects and methods /and/ a good compiler is Rscheme (one I could
find, at least. I'd like to hear if there are others). Unfortunately
the bloody thing keeps the complete transaction log and if there is 
a db compactification function, it certainly isn't documented. :(

	Miro