Follow Babbages Mono progress

As Babbage Linden (Jim Purbrick, a fellow brit!) has been working on the rewrite of Second Lifes scripting subsystem to use Mono, he has been posting to the Mono developers mailing list with questions and discussion. From this it's been possible to follow along and see how he is doing.

Here's his latest (I think) post from 22nd February:

http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-devel-list/2006-February/017273.html

Executive summary is that as of a few weeks ago he was working on making the grid robust against hackers and buggy compilers. The tests he's been writing are for a subsystem of Mono called the bytecode verifier. Put simply, it's the job of the bytecode verifier to construct a mathematical proof that the code it's about to run cannot violate the rules of the system (eg accessing data from other scripts running on the same machine). He found that Mono was incomplete in this regard, and was working on making it work better.

Here's another post of his:

http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-devel-list/2006-January/016615.html

In other words, in January he was working on ensuring that script memory limits are enforced correctly. He hit problems with the code that loads the script when it transitions between sims being counted towards the scripts memory usage which clearly isn't right. I guess he fixed it!

Anyway, it looks like he's making awesome progress, and is finishing off the work necessary to make it deployable on the main grid. After that comes all the bugfixing of course, which we might not see much of in public. But still, an interesting look at what Jims job entails.

Enjoy, and go go Jim!

Nice finds! Thanx for the tech explanations too. Jim AKA Babbage is SUCH a nice guy... such a sense of humor too.

Thanks for the links Mack.

Onward March Of Progress... etc, etc.