[MUD-Dev] Tuplespaces and MUDs

[ceo]

J C Lawrence wrote:

> Are tuplespaces interesting for game development?  What would be
> needed to make them more interesting?

IIRC they're already being used in game development, under that
guise - I thought that IBM's grid computing used ts's extensively,
and Butterfly is an IBM grid...as is PS3 (IIRC?).[1]

FYI, we use the similar concept of unbound message-queues [2] a lot
in the execution layer. Personally, I'm not entirely sure what the
difference is between the two concepts - to me they have always
seemed alternative implementations of the same abstract concept, but
done in such a way that each encourages the user/developer into
structuring their programming in different ways (they each have an
inherent "spin").

I find tuplespaces far too abstract to be tenable in real-world
programming with real-world programmers who don't have phd's in CS
and have never heard of ts's nor probably want to. Unbound MQ's seem
to be a lot easier for today's typical programmer to get to grips
with, perhaps because they are a clear logical extension of a
paradigm that most programmers are very comfortable with
already. Perhaps simply because they can relate them to what they
already know, and instantly spot the benefits and uses - whereas
many people seem to look at ts's and go:

  "Huh? What do I do with that?"

FWIW, I'm currently looking at whether we'd solve some of our
problems by binding more of those MQ's [3]...there are considerable
late-in-development-cycle problems that occur where your structure
is too implicit and not easily reasoned about offline.

  [1] - then again, perhaps I'm thinking instead of one of the
  several different distributed computing API's that are used on IBM
  grids.

  [2] - by "unbound" I mean they have no explicit target. This is
  effectively the same as a ts, in that when you throw a t into a
  ts, you are sending it out to "no-one in particular, but anyone
  who wants to find it".

  [3] - which of course you can also do with ts's: the classic
  approach IIRC is simply to make a "private" ts which is only
  accessed by a single reader...

Adam M
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