[MUD-Dev] TECH: What about Perl flavored MUDs?

[James Edward Gray II]

Seems Java's future as a MUD language is secured by other threads.
What do people think about Perl?  I'm still in the design phase of
my grand MUD and I've been looking at many languages to father it
in.  Perl appeals to me on many levels, foremost it's raw power of
ultimate text manipulation.  It suites some of the feature I want
better than anything else, and has always made for pleasant
programming for me.

There are definitely drawbacks though: Perl threading is not yet
equal to the task for sure.  I believe this is the least of my
worries though, as Mutliplexing and Non-blocking IO should at least
get me past it.  The event loop will have to doll out time to the
active elements to the MUD between reads.  I believe that will work,
though I admit I have no idea what it's limits will be.  I assume
users in the hundreds would be very doable with this kind of model,
but thousands?  Next, Perl seems to suffer a fair hit for Object
Orientation and I can't live without it.  It's how I think and I
need to have a modular expandable engine.  I'll pay the price, but
does this lower the user count further?  Finally, my big fear, is
Perls garbage collector up to it?  I believe Perl uses a simple
reference count collection, which should plenty accurate for most
things.  What about Perl's data structures though, it expands them
geometrically right?  Does it make any attempt to reclaim that
memory?  I honestly don't know.

If anyone has any experience with Perl servers or any wisdom they
can impart along those lines, I would love to hear it.  I really
want to try Perl because I believe it can do what I want to do.  I
want to go into it with my eyes open though, so I'll listen if
anyone has experience here, good or bad.  Thanks for your time.

James

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