[MUD-Dev] Re: DBMS in MU*'s

[s001gmu at nova.wright.edu]

On Tue, 11 Aug 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:

> On Mon, 20 Jul 1998 15:50:33 -0400 (EDT) 
> s001gmu <s001gmu at nova.wright.edu> wrote:
> 
> > (btw, JC, you've won me over on the spoof's idea.  I had decided to
> > *cough* borrow the watchers before, and had been deliberating on
> > spoffs.  *bow*)
> 
> Spoofs BTw have a large weakness: Making sure they are destroyed.  Its
> (comparitively) easy to have objects spoofed and to either forget to
> destroy the spoof or to leave permutations open that don't destroy the
> spoof.  The result is that you get objects accumulating spoofs ad
> infinitum (I found one such leak when I noticed that my character
> object had over 300 spoofs) with method calls becming slower and
> slower as they filter thru more and more layers of spoofs.
> 
> Think of it like memory leaks -- it really is the same probl;em in
> essence.
> 
> To help address the problem I've made frameworks for spoofs, default
> constructor, destructor etc, as well as a simple way to state the
> conditions that a spoof should exist in, and the conditions it
> shouldn't.  This last is a catch-all attempt operating on the basis
> that a hidden function gets called whenever a spoof method is invoked.
> The hidden function then checks if the current state is valid for the
> relevant spoof, and if not destructs the spoof.  Essentially a sort of
> rule based garbage collection.  My fear is that user programmer will
> come to rely on the rule sets rather than defining their own
> detection/destruction semantics -- meaning that errors or absences in
> the rule sets provide new leak opportunities.

This sounds like it would only be a major problem in a system with user
programming.  Since I fully plan on not having such a beast, I feel my
abilities at quashing memory leaks should be sufficeint to handle proper
destruction of spoofs.  Thanks for the word of warning though.  :)

<OT>
For some reason, I just can't type the word 'spoof' w/o stoping and
forcing myself to remember how you spell it.  It ends up as 'spoff', or
'sppof' all too often if I just plug along and don't look at it (see my
original quote above. :)
*shrug*  
</OT>

-Greg