[MUD-Dev] Introduction

[Dan Root]

clawrenc at cup.hp.com writes:

> >The other two code bases I was primarily interested in (UnterMUD and
> >UberMUD) were quite small as well, with most of the features I
> >wanted, but with quirky coding (MJR's code is beautiful... if you can
> >understand it) that made modifaction hard.
> 
> You bet.  Marcus Ranum's code is flat out gorgeous and damned
> efficient.  Its a shame he dropped out of the field.

Indeed.  I should say though, that while his later code is quite nice
(Unter 2.0+ is very clean for the most part), it's damn near
incomprehensible without a lot of caffeine and forcing oneself to stay
awake until it groks. :)

> >(FWIW, someone mentioned that process context switching was
> >expensive.  This is true, but your server is going to be switched out
> >anyways, as it's unlikely that nothing else is running on the machine
> >at all.)
> 
[snip explanation of context switch overhead for larger numbers of processes]

Agreed.  In 'the most efficient' case, you never, ever, context
switch. :)  But if your OS is going to do it for you anyway, having a
small number (two, possibly three) that seperates out all the blocking
into seperate processes can be a pretty big win.


	-DaR
--
Dan Root - dar at thekeep.org