Random Chitchat 2012-2016

[tigerw]

Oh noez! Competing server software! https://github.com/SpaceManiac/Glowstone , http://www.reddit.com/r/admincraft/comme...n_support/

Now I understand what corporate competition feels like.

Though its written in Java.

And is very young in terms of features.

[FakeTruth]

They got nothin' on us!!
Though having the Bukkit API is really, really nice

[xoft]

There have been loads of MineCraft server projects, but only very few have survived until now. Remember MineServer? Remember NessusMS? Remember BurningPig? We'll see how long it takes them to rot away.

Bukkit API may be nice, but Lua is much easier. Have you seen the page describing just setting up the IDE for Bukkit plugin development?

[worktycho]

Also when going for performance C++ gives you a lot more to tune. Stack allocated classes, templates (No boxing gives significant performance advantages), intrinsics, deterministic destruction (No GC spikes). If they really want performance there going to end up using JNI to c++ code.

[FakeTruth]

Bukkit API may be nice, but Lua is much easier. Have you seen the page describing just setting up the IDE for Bukkit plugin development?

That is true, but you can't deny that it is nice that you can just take existing plugins and use them. Which is actually the only advantage though

[worktycho]

My point is that they can't fulfil both aims. If they want performance advantages over vanilla they need to drop to c++ but if they want to remain compatible with bukkit they need to stay in java. So they'll either have to sacrifice performance for compatibility and only be slightly faster or lose compatibility in some places as they use native code.

---

also do you know how much of a hot path sending whole chunks is?

[xoft]

I've heard rumors about Java being able to JIT-compile the bytecode so that it actually executes faster than compiled C++ code. That's because Java can optimize for the specific machine on which it is running, while the C++ compiled code (usually) needs to be compatible with many platforms, thus it doesn't use all the performance enhancements it could. This might be especially true in the Windows world, where the users expect a single EXE to run on any Windows computer, so there's very little in the way of optimizations that could be done for a generic release. Of course, there are things like the video codecs that use dynamic code, but we don't want to go there

[xoft]

Finally got home from the dancing weekend, I'm exhausted!

[worktycho]

From what I've heard. A generic C++ build using high level abstraction runs at similar speeds to java JITed code as the ability to optimise for specific machines is offset by optimisation times. However if you compile for the machine your running on C++ thrashes the Java because offline optimisation has so much more time to run. Also if you've identified hot paths C++ allows a lot more manual optimisations.

[tonibm19]

One question: If I compile MCServer myself (now I'm using bearbin builds), will I get more performance?
Probably not but I'd like to know.