[MUD-Dev] Virtual machine design

[Mik Clarke]

claw at kanga.nu wrote:

> On Sat, 17 Apr 1999 16:26:38 +0200 (CEST)
> Felix A Croes <felix at dworkin.nl> wrote:
>
> > Of course, there would be no point in redoing the operating system
> > as it is.
>
> MUD servers bear a remarkable resemblance to simple OS'es.  In fact,
> outside of some hardware specifica, is there anything an OS
> generally does, or needs to do, that a MUD server doesn't?

Dispatching. Most muds are single threaded or rely on the OS to dispatch
between the threads.

Batch job scheduling.  Muds (and many OSs) don't have the concept of
batch processing.

File system handling.  Muds are able to read/write from files, and maybe
manage a few subdirectories, but the OS handles all of the files,
including loading the MUD code.

Failed process/system recovery.  When an application, or the system it
is running on dies, the OS should be able to restart it (on another
system).  Most muds die when the first process fails. Harking to the
reboot discussions, there are OSs (plus some extra hardware and
software) that will automatically recover your application to a site up
to 20 miles away if your main site dies (costs a few million doallars,
but there are applications where it is worth it).

Yes, you probably could merge an OS with a MUD, but I suspect that
internally you would end up with almost the same split as today. A
fairly dumb resource management/babysitter layer and the MUD itself that
runs under it.  From a development/resource point of view it also seems
a fairly strange thing to do. A lot of people have put a lot of time and
money into making the OS work (generally with more important things in
mind than mudding), so why would you want to throw that away and write
your own? (Other than just because it's interesting/cool).  I think the
trick for MUD development is to try and leverage as much of that
infrastructure as possible, reducing the ammount of MUD code you need to
write.

Mik




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