Erlang

[SamJBarney]

Anyone here familiar with the programming language, Erlang? It's one of my favorite languages

[NiLSPACE]

I heard about it, and saw that someone made a Minecraft server with it, but that's it.

[SamJBarney]

Its a pretty sweet language for writing servers in, due to how reliable it can be. Its a functional language, running on top of its own VM, designed for massively parallel server applications.

---

I've seen a couple of the minecraft servers written in it, but they've never really had any success because the projects were dropped due to lack of help or lack of ambition.

[SamJBarney]

The reason I ask is I am busy writing a script-like language on top of the Erlang VM to test something I suggested somewhere on this forum. Can't really remember where right now...

Anyways, the jist of it was storing JUST the changes made to a chunk rather than the entire chunk, and then when a chunk was required, generate the chunk, apply the changes, and then calculate the lighting.

So I was hoping there was someone on here that was interested in helping finish up the language so we could see how feasible the idea is.

[xoft]

A scripting language built on top of an interpreted language wrapped around a compiled language? Don't go too crazy

Did you do any measurements before actually jumping in? The lighting calculation is by far the slowest part of the entire process, loading a chunk is much, much (much much much) faster than having to recalculate the light. Just sayin'

[SamJBarney]

I'm not writing a language on top of another language. I'm writing a scripting language that compiles down into the expected bytecode for the VM. I don't lose any of the functionality of Erlang, but I get all of the benefits of the scripting language.

And yes, I did know that lighting took the longest, and it is much quicker to load a completely finished chunk from disk. However, I wanted to see how little could be stored on disk without compromising visible performance on the client's end, and I felt that Erlang would be the best place to test this due to its threading system.

Believe me, this is just a project to satisfy my own curiosity. And who knows, it may develop into a sister server for MCServer, but I highly doubt it.

Plus, Erlang is awesome.

[worktycho]

I agree on the Erlang. Also for the deltas, one place I could see this being useful for is cheap VM servers where the IO is really slow.