[vworld-tech] Modern MUD server design

[Brian Hook]

> However, in conjuction with the tight sandbox previously mentioned,
> you can have scads of level developers writing masses of scripts
> and never once worrying that one person will be introducing a show
> stopper, or becoming a gating item for the rest.

The problem here is that you need to make sure that your language 
actually supports both security and cycle policies, and I know that, 
at least, Lua does not support this.

Which means it just takes one guy doing:

while true
end

to toast the whole system =/  

Someone on gamedevlists-general mentioned he had modified the Lua VM 
to enforce scheduling, but even in that situation a while (1) ; is 
still going to hurt you no matter what.  It won't freeze the system 
but it will definitely cause a performance hit, and if that piece of 
code is in enough objects, you're going to have major problems.

> Maybe it's just me, but I see productivity being the biggest issue

It absolutely is.  Technology is clearly a second class concern 
compared to process.

Brian