[349] in Coldmud discussion meeting

Re: floating point

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sat Jun 4 04:23:46 1994 )

From: deforest@netcom.com (Robert de Forest)
To: coldstuff@MIT.EDU
Date: Sat, 4 Jun 1994 01:16:41 -0700 (PDT)
Reply-To: coldstuf@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <9406040410.AA03299@kernighan.cba.csuohio.edu> from "Randy Beiter" at Jun 4, 94 00:10:40 am

> 
> >  to be a nicer solution from a server development perspective. Besides,
> >  I doubt very much that ColdMUD would be fast enough to be useful as a
> >  simulation language. I think you'd be better off writing your simulation
> >  in C or C++ and using someone's libraries.
> 
> are you refering to coldmud's speed in particular, or do you include
> servers like moo, and etc in the statement that it isn't fast enough? i'm
> just curious if (and why, if so) you feel coldmud's speed to be inferior
> to say, moo.
> 
> -merl
> 
> 
> 

I was thinking of 'interpreted' languages, actually. It would be better to
 write a computation-intensive simulation in a compiled language since the
 calculations probably won't be changing much. You could write a simulation
 in BASIC and run it on a cray, but why not compile the BASIC and get a 10x
 increase in speed? Likewise, you could write a space simulator in ColdMUD,
 but why not write a space simulation server in C or C++ and use ColdMUD
 for the interface? (Meaning, have the ColdMUD server connect to a special-
 purpose server running on another port and only communnicating with the
 Cold server.)

Since I'm up late and this sounds weird I'll re-state what I think. You could
 do heavy math in ColdMUD but you'd be wasting cycles. See Greg's post.

As for th actual speed of ColdMUD, it seems to be faster according to some.
 This makes sense, considering some key differences. One important difference
 is the use of symbols which are stored as numbers. This makes method calls
 far faster, since instead of looking for a string in a list of method names,
 the server is looking for a number. 

Also, ColdMUD is disk-based, as you know, which means disk activity should be
 optimized. (If it weren't disk-based, the OS would have to decide what goes
 in real memory and what is swapped out to disk. Since the Cold server is
 aware of things the OS is not, it should be able to make better decisions
 about what should be where.)

Crag,
up way to late as usual.

-- 
"Mr. Tater, I think I have a punishment for you that is fair, just, and
 clever. Or maybe just fairly clever."

    -- King Yakko of Anvilania.