[MUD-Dev] Re: PDMud (was Re: Bruce Sterling on Virtual Community goals)

[James Wilson <jwilson#rochester,rr.com>]

On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Niklas Elmqvist wrote:
>[Chris Gray:]
>
>Or is there a better alternative to a message-based communication system
>like this? Anyone with more experience in these things than I?

Dunno if this helps - several years ago I implemented a bare-bones server
using dynamically-loaded native-code modules. Each module had a set of
dependencies which would be automatically loaded before it. The dynamic-linking
phase connected symbols in each module to symbols in other modules, and
everything was happy. (Note that some systems' dlopen only resolves symbols
from dynamically-loaded modules to the main executable, so inter-module
linkage had to be done by hand with dlsym. I think the issue was with the SGI
dl* functions.) There was no need for message-based communication;  you could
directly call methods and functions in other modules. The bootstrap module
loaded other modules by name, so didn't have to know anything about them (this
was controlled by a text file).

This worked pretty well, but forced me to write plugins in C++. The obvious
solution was to translate a mud-lang to C++, then to a shared library, then
load it in dynamically... at this point I ran amok with language issues and
never really recovered.

James