Saving myself for MONO?

I just finished a two-month scripting project, one which is very near and dear to me (really my raison d'etre for even being in SL) and I have another big, complementary project plan (which may take just as long).

Should I just wait for MONO? Because I'm not looking forward to porting all my other code as it is, but it will have to be done eventually.

Advice from other scripters and interested parties, please.

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for MONO.

Mono's probably a year off yet.

Can I get a link for reading up on MONO? I was understanding it as LSL would still be the final compiled result. Is this not so? Christ I'm just now learning how to script LSL.

If I waited for Havok 2 I'd still be walking around on my own feet instead of bypasssing the weak-ass 31 prim vehicle limit.

All kinds of weird thoughts and confusion went through my head when I read the subject line of this thread. Then I remembered which MONO was being talked about!

I expect the next project I'm working on to take between 2 and 5 months. So the upper end of that estimate is what concerns me. I'd hate to spend 5 months building and 3 months porting the old and new projects...That gets to be almost a year of building time anyway.

Ah well, I'm probably too impatient to hold off on it anyway...

MONO as I understand it is a layer of software good for putting languages on, and while LSL would be implemented for compatibility, the use of MONO might make it possible to use other languages written for .NET. to be implemented.

I'd like a fancy BASIC, Pascal, forth, and Logo.

From what i've read Mono is just a compiler, so LSL shouldn't change. They will just recompile all the scripts using mono.

Mono is lsl compatible, and the mono virtual machine will run lsl scripts, you can read more in babbages blog http://secondlife.blogs.com/babbage/2005/11/mono_lsl2.html

That's my understanding too. My fear is that LSL support will ultimately be deprecated in the face of the other languages that can be utilized on top of MONO.

Also SNOBOL, but only because it has such a cute name.

Havok2 wouldn't help you there anyway, you'd need havok3

For extra geek points, SNOBOL should only be enabled in the snow sims

If you think script timings are unpredictable now, wait until people can write compute-intensive loops... or even infinite loops... that run in native code.

MONO will let scripts lag sims like never before.

The net result from implementing Mono will be exactly the same as we have now, except faster.

Currently LSL is running through an interpreter. Once mono arrives the LSL scripts will first be compiled to native code before execution, but LSL itself will not change. Obviously for this to happen running scripts will need to be stopped, recompiled, then re-started. For most scripts this will not be a problem and even scripts that rely on persistant memory for storage willl not be affected as the process can be done between the normal cpu time slices that all the running scripts share.
There will also be a period where interpreted LSL and mono will be running side by side to ensure all is well before complete switch over.

Allowing other .NET compliant languages will be possible once Mono is in place, however that is a seperate project and not an automatic product of using mono.

You can write compute intensive loops and infinate loops right now in LSL, once they're mono compiled they'll not lag the server any more than now as the cpu time slices will work exactly the same way. The only difference is that it would take 100 times the number of scripts to produce the same amount of lag...

I was just saying, don't hold your breath for promised features. Expect something shiny and distracting out of the blue that no one asked for or knew about instead of stability or requested stuff.

How exactly will that work? Given the number of scripts a sim supports, I find it hard to believe they're depending on the UNIX clock for timeslicing... which means they must have context switches in the interpreter to implement it. With MONO, they'll have to modify the generated code to explicitly add those context switches in every loop.

So add it to the Mono VM.

How do you know how the implementation processs will occur? Are you just saying what you think would make sense to occur?

Would the potential additional languages have to be produced by LL or would users be able to produce what would needed for LL to add the language in?

Might we get a better IDE - at least a good text editor - with MONO's arrival?

Is someone gonna shoot me if I don't capitalize MONO?

They don't capitalize it at http://mono-project.com/ either.

I spent an afternoon talking to the specific Linden that is working on this... No, he didn't tell me any secrets or juicy Linden gossip

Well, they do capitalize the first letter, which is a shame. I supose they want to help distinguish it from the disease. .NET is capitalized on that mono website; folks are probably carrying over the uppercase from .NET.

A shift key keypress saved is a shift key keypress earned. Hitting the caps lock key for acronyms if you aren't fully alert may lead to a "tYPING dISASTER".

I've done stuff like that.

If LL is doing that, while the Mono VM is still a moving target, that would explain why it's taking so long. But then REALLY don't hold your breath waiting for Mono.