[Opensim-users] use of C# in scripts

Thu Feb 28 21:07:11 UTC 2019

Uh, I have been in SL since 2004 and I never saw much of anything in the
way of tech support for users except various forums and websites, many user
run in no small part.  And back in the day a wandering Linden or two.  So
they are not and as far as I know have not invested much in tech support
for users.  Most things the users figured out for themselves just as the
built almost all the content.

R&D perhaps in the old days and perhaps for Sansar which no one who has
been in this a long time that I know of really wants.  That it is PC only
doesn't help.  That it takes away some of the hack it together yourself
inworld is not good either.  Back in the day there was some real SL
research including hypergrid like functionality which they then nixed and
an web viewer project which I used.  It was not bad.  But also shelved for
some bizarre reason.

And their monolithic server archiceture could learn a LOT from opensim.
 Opening up to hypergrid would breathe a lot of life into it.  Bringing
down the price of land superciliously would come with that.  Server costs
could drop with a bring your own server into the grid (a la osgrid but more
proprietary) could lower their internal costs a lot.  If they needed more
money then charge monthly fees for various levels of service from free up.
Let the users that made ti great to start with lay hands on more parts of
their own infrastructure and destiny at whatever level of skill or buying
stuff others built they have.

Some things are VERY low hanging fruit like a scriptable inventory system
so ways of managing that crap that make much better sense can be done.  And
the old User, Assets, etc server architecture and communication protocols
to/from them are an abomination relative to modern practices.  I would love
to see a NoSQL db for some of this and nothing but json protocol or better
to/from these things.

Even in OpenSim there seems to be a hidebound conservatism for changing all
that much without doing a fork.  This includes a fear from what i hear of
even cleaning up and refactoring the rather old-school C# style used.  I
think a lot more really good hackers would get a lot more done if that was
not so.  Perhaps a hard fork under more liberal administration would be a
good thing?  Dunno.  Not deep enough into that side of things to understand
how much of a problem there is and what can be done.

On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 12:35 AM Asaff Belfer <asaffb at gmail.com> wrote:

> I get your feelings and I think the same that LSL can be better. I've been
> in SL only a few years but I can imagine what goes on behind the scene. I
> believe it's a struggle to keep such a company afloat as there is a huge
> infrastructure to support and a complex system that requires end user
> support as many low tech users are using it and tech support is an
> expensive resource. Add research and development to it and you'll get a
> monster that you need to feed.
>
> As for opensim, I think that a secondary scripting system can be added. If
> today you can annotate your code to specify the script language (i.e. c#)
> maybe there is a way to set things up so that you could implement other
> scripting languages and use that annotation to route the code to the right
> compiler.
>
>
> Asaff
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 12:16 AM Haravikk <opensim at haravikk.me> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > > On 26 Feb 2019, at 19:28, Serendipity Seraph <seren.seraph at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > As a software engineer the things that deeply bug me about LSL include:
> > >
> > > 1) no real way to get reuse vs copy and paste where needed.  Major blow
> > to
> > > possible efficiency gains of not having multiple copies and to
> > > maintainability.  No import/include or library concept or support.
> > >
> > > 2) almost no real data structures  and no way to roll your own.  Yeah
> you
> > > can do 1970s era hacks sort of.
> >
> > The problem with LSL is that it's just plain shit, to use the correct
> > technical expression; I mean seriously, no proper array but instead we
> get
> > a linked-list that is fully copied on even minor modifications, thus
> > eliminating all benefits of it being a linked list? So you got both
> linear
> > access time, bad performance all round AND you can't even add to it
> > efficiently!
> >
> > I dunno if OpenSim managed to optimise that to use a real linked list
> > behind the scenes but then performance hasn't been such a big issue for
> me
> > since I'm running lightweight private sims on actually half-decent
> > hardware, but for Second Life itself it's always been a bad joke for, has
> > been now for what, 15 years?
> >
> > It always bugged me how much it felt like somebody's first year compiler
> > class project that they then just rammed into the first programming job
> > they got, which to our misfortune happened to be Second Life, and we've
> > been stuck with it ever since.
> >
> > Obviously I get why OpenSim keeps LSL, since it makes it easier for
> people
> > to port scripts over from SL, but man it's a bad language. There were
> > superior scripting languages 20 years before SL even existed; it has
> never
> > made any sense why they rolled their own, or didn't even copy elements
> from
> > actually good languages and APIs. The SL version of LSL is also the only
> > language I'm aware of that has not one, but three broken implementations
> of
> > base64 XOR; seriously, not one of them is actually correct.
> >
> >
> > Sorry, that's really just a bit of a rant and not terribly constructive,
> > but man it annoys me.
> >
> > OpenSim has so many useful capabilities compared to SL but it does still
> > feel like LSL constrains what we can do a bit; I can only imagine how
> great
> > it'd be to have a proper object oriented API in some other language, but
> I
> > doubt it's something I'm likely to have time to work on myself.
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> >
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