Hold on to your hat's guys .. MONO is commin !!

I am looking forward to this upgrade. I know the road will bumpy but all sorts of things will improve once we ditch the crusty old LSL engine. Script performance will leap as more scripts get converted and new things will be possible under the new engine.

If I recall correctly one might expect mono compiled scripts to occupy more space than the older compiler produced.

Is this going to mean more lag crossing sim borders with mono laden objects due to more bytes to transfer from one sim to the next?

Good question, I don't know. I would hope not. If it turns out to be true then we will have a take na step back instead of forward given how bad border crossings can be.

Old LSL had a fixed 16K image size, the new stuff is variable (potentially a lot smaller for the really simple scripts out there), so that part might be a wash. More of an open question is how good each VM is at picking up those blobs and continuing with execution.

I'm a scripting no-hoper, so forgive me.

For a while, I would imagine there'll be an optional mono release client and a regular, old fashioned standard client. Will the mono created scripts work in the standard client?

I did a fairly thorough testing of mono vs non-mono LSL scripts some time ago and the outcome is a mixed bag.

The actual running of the scripts was a dead heat to nicely faster (like 3-5x faster). It would be pretty rare for anything to run like 220x faster :/ consider twice as fast over all fortunate. Not bad. However there is a HUGE gotcha (Of course, there has to be always!)

The initialization/setup of launching a script in a sim is like 100 times slower. Meaning if a 1500 mono script dragon were to rez into your sim it would probably die for a time. I pulled out like 70 scripts at once and got the sim to lag pretty bad.

Will be fun to see if that problem has been fixed or not in the coming days.

My parents thought I had it. Turned out I was just really bored.

Script execution is all server-side. When the sim supports Mono, it will be able to run both Mono- and LSL2-compiled scripts, regardless of which version of the viewer one is using.

The problem is with *compiling* scripts: pre-Mono, that happened in the viewer, and the resulting bytecode was uploaded to the sim. With Mono, all script compilation happens on the server, so a new viewer is needed for that.

And the new viewer is needed to interact with scripts that use the new llDetectedTouch functions as the old viewer will not pass the co-ordinates back to the script.
It is up to the scripter at this point to notify you that your viewer is not supported.

The new viewer is only necessary to create MONO scripts. Scripts execute on the server (which is why people are asking about their effect during region crossings) so then client isn't an issue.

I think the move to supporting standard Mono languages will come sooner than expected. That is a good thing as LSL is a horribly designed language. Mono is an implementation of Microsoft's .NET technologies which allow multiple "high" level languages compile to an intermediary bytecode that executes in the Virtual Machine. There are dozens of languages available under .NET beyond VB.net and C# and many of them are supported under MONO. Integrating the Second Life-specific functions as libraries to the framework will allow you to combine standard programming constructs with needed SL functions. Add a wealth of existing libraries and things such as remote procedure calls get true error trapping and a wealth of internal data storage options.

Scripts interact with Viewers and a new viewer IS Required if the NEW llDetectedTouch Functions are used. I agree that scripts compiled to MONO that DO NOT use any of the new functions will not need a new Viewer but a blanket statement that the client is not an issue is wrong. Not trying to start a fight, it's just that as this is a non technical forum I would hate for the readers to be misled into thinking that the scripts are broken when, in fact, they need a new viewer to use them.

The new touch functions were are also added to the old LSL runtime. There are also clients that can compile to Mono, with or without those functions, but not use them. So they're really separate things.

They don't need a viewer to run them (except for llDetectedTouch etc... scripts) just to edit them, I think your confusing the two in this case since having a viewer to deal with mono is only relevant for script writers and those that want to recompile scripts in mono.

I'm sure this probably been mentioned earlier in this thread but I believe currently the beta viewer is the only one that has client side mono support since I don't think the rc is out yet for mono.... Ctrl G will bring up the change grid dialog and you can change aditi to agni though to get a mono viewer that works on the main grid now.

/me stands up and claps!

But you heff to do de aggzent or pipple von't get de referenze.

Pressing CTRL-G when?

Oh, on the login screen, press control G and a new dropdown box will appear showing the different grid identifiers.