[MUD-Dev] Re: PDMud thread summary

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Jo Dillon wrote:
> 
> Jon Leonard (jleonard at divcom.slimy.com) spake thusly:

[skipped]

> > In short, I think portability is important, and with only a little extra
> > effort we can make stuff portable even beyond the range of posix systems.
> >
> > Things we'll have to be careful about for portability:
> >
> > Endianness (sending data between systems might get mangled)
> > 64-bit cleanliness (sizeof(int) isn't necessarily sizeof(pointer))
> > Threads
> > Sockets and other non-blocking IO
> > Other things I haven't thought about
> 
>   Threads and sockets should definitely be abstracted IMHO; I've got
> a thin blocking socket and threads wrapper somewhere.

Recently I with amusement realized that a lot of developers can't
clearly think in terms of abstraction levels. One more thing which is
directly related to the portability (and even more, to the good design)
is abstraction levels and modules as abstractions.

Getting back on topic, sockets are easily abstracted as streams (and
Java is a living example of that), threads as services, and there's one
more very important abstraction (which I'm fighting with right now, but
the subject had been beaten to death already): storage system.

Again to my surprise, it was simpler and faster for me to implement the
filesystem based storage system, than to do the same with a database.

>         Jo

--
Still alive and smile stays on,
Vadim Tkachenko <vt at freehold.crocodile.org>
--
UNIX _is_ user friendly, he's just very picky about who his friends are