[MUD-Dev] Schmuse

[J C Lawrence]

It turns out that one of the guys I wark with at Critical Path,
David LaMacchia, was partly responsible for Schmuse while at MIT:

  http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~dml/luv-95-report.ps
  http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~dml/oopsla-93.text
  http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~dml/schmuse-manual.ps

--<cut>--
MIT SchMUSE (pronounced "shmooz") is a concurrent, distributed,
delegation- based object-oriented simulation environment with
persistence.  It is de- signed to run in a "capricious" network
environment, where servers can migrate from site to site, and
regularly become unavailable. Our design introduces a new form of
unique identifiers called globally unique tickets that provide
globally unique time/space stamps for objects without being location
specific.  Object location is achieved by a distributed hierarchical
lazy lookup mechanism, which we call realm resolution. We also
introduce a novel mech- anism called message deferral for enhanced
reliability in the face of remote delegation. Finally, in
alpha-testing our implementation, we encountered a subtle difficulty
with blocking-based concurrency in remote delegation and transaction
dead lock. We briefly outline the problem and our solution. We
conclude with a comparison to related work and a projection of
future work on SchMUSE.

...

We chose to implement our system in MIT Scheme [Hanson 91 ] [Clinger
& Rees 91 ] [IEEE 91 ]. Our object system is modelled after the
delegation-based OOPS style of [Adams & Rees 88 ], primarily because
that is the language in which our course is taught. None of our
results are specific to Scheme: we could as well have implemented
this system in Smalltalk-80 [XLRG 81 ], CLOS [Bobrow et al. 90 ],
Dylan [Apple 92 ] or even C++ [Stroustrup 86 ].1 
--<cut>--

Unfortunately:

--<cut>--
This research was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and was monitored by
the Office of Naval Research under contract number N00014-83-K-0125.
--<cut>--

Which means that the source is legally tied up under DARPA.  However
David would likely be willing to answer questions about it (he's
been threatening to subscribe for a while now).

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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