Scripting Engine Questions

1. What's the status of Mono?
   
2. Is there ANY chance we can play with it in the beta grid?
   
3. Are there plans to open source the code prior to implementation to assist in the development?
   
4. Will the languages used by the engine retain the ability to do high level things like open sockets?
   
5. Will the engine allow languages to exploit graphic commands to draw dynamic textures, and draw buttons?
   1. If yes to the first, will scripts also be able to work to create dynamic sculpted prims?
      
   2. If no to the second, has it been considered that this would allow customized interface creation far better than the blue dialog we're all growing accustomed to hating?
      
   
   
6. What will script sizes be increased to after the engine change to accommodate more advanced programming techniques (like classes, pointers, and multidimensional arrays)?
   

Hope the questions get answered, even if it's just as a private email.

Mono would be wonderful I guess, but IMHO unless there is a bit more commitment to making what is already in LSL actually work it won't make any difference. There seems to be far too much acceptance by LL that if something is broken in a release that fixing say 75% of it is good enough. The result is the current state of LSL where the API is full of oddities that don't work correctly and are only discovered when a project stops working or something that the developer never imagined could be a problem suddenly becomes a gating factor.

Whatever the scripting engine, it won't help if it doesn' work. The current limit to building content in SL IMHO is bugs not lack of features.

As I understand it Mono is just intended to replace current scripting which is still ultimately a virtual machine type system, anything the scripts want to do externally to that environment have to go through the simulator. The result is that moving a prim, sending an HTTP request etc. is a request made of the simulator.

It should however easily open up greater performance and things like arrays which will allow us to make our memory work harder for us. Hopefully we'll get more data-types, I don't know how lists are implemented at the moment, but things like trees for faster item searching and automatic sorting would be nice.
I'm unsure about memory, maybe if Mono uses it more efficiently (ie a script with 2k of data only uses 2k of memory or thereabouts) then it would be nice.

My understanding is that Mono replaces the underlying Virtual Machine and the LSL to code generator/optimizer.

LSL does not necessarily change, nor do new languages necessarily appear.

I was looking for those informations as well. Here are some answers:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/12/20/town-hall-with-cory-introductory-transcript/