[MUD-Dev] Writing a MUD Server in Visual Basic?

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

> From: Matt Owen [mailto:MOwen at Channel4.co.uk]
 
> A colleague of mine has recently been talking about writing a MUD
> server in visual basic, as he believes that the speed of current
> machines more than outweighs VBs sluggishness.
 
> I'm not so sure it's possible to write a server in VB, even for a
> small scale world (~64 players), aren't there threading and load
> balancing issues ?  Thoughts or comments anyone ?

I would say, that in all likelihood it would be pure folly. Firstly
VB doesn't /really/ support multiple threads. You might be able to
do some voodoo with calling into Win32 CreateThread directly, but
frankly to do that even half safely you'd need to have enough
knowledge that you'd probably rather be in C++. By leveraging COM,
you can have multiple threads, but the limitations of VB make it
undesirable. Essentially VB only supports single threaded
appartments (a COM thing), and that means that any interthread
invocations have to be marshalled and thats slow.

So I wouldn't recommend it, even if you write it single threaded the
code is probably going to be nasty. VB is ok for throwing together
GUIs, but I don't buy using it for large amounts of back end work.

When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail... I just think
VB is a pretty specialised hammer, so its worth having a few more in
the tool box.

Dan
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