Show HN: I rewrote the 1990's LambdaMOO server

NelsonMinar

Wow neat! LambdaMOO was such an influential thing for. MUDs in general had a lot of influence, both in social media and gaming. And then LambdaMOO had the specific brief of being a social media experiment. Neat to see the tech reborn!

Pavel Curtis is still out there, LinkedIn says he recently left his job at Microsoft after 20 years. He also runs a puzzle shop: http://www.pavelspuzzles.com/site/

skulk

I love seeing projects like this! I have one too, but it completely throws away compatibility and is very simplistic. I opted for a lisp-like language instead of a lua-like language (https://github.com/sid-code/nmoo but don't look at the code, it's embarrassing).

I have some questions:

  - Does each verb call create a whole new world state that it mutates, and later commits to the database? That's the impression I get from reading the code. Does this come with a lot of overhead?
  - What is that emacs mode you're using to edit verb code?

branon

There's a great book about the original instance of this software, https://www.amazon.com/My-Tiny-Life-Passion-Virtual/dp/08050... fun old internet flamewars and a lot of discussion about the gender spectrum and how it's expressed by individuals online.

fzzzy

There's a fork called stunt / improvise that implements hashmaps. I'd love it if the list syntax was changed to use square brackets, and then if the hashmap syntax could be curly braces.

I've also wanted to give each object an isolated environment (make each one an actor), but I haven't thought too deeply about how exactly that would work and look. I've been planning in the back of my head to do this at some point in the next year, and was planning on implementing on top of the original codebase, but if there's a rust version, I'll use that.

I know it wouldn't be compatible with existing cores, but I'd be using it as the backend for a graphical ui anyway.

How did you go about converting the code? Did you just read through it, or did you start with a c to rust tool? I always thought the programmers manual and codebase were quite concise and readable.

One last thing, there were patches in the 90s to add journaling on top of the checkpoint system... Did those ever get merged into the main codebase?

Thanks for doing this! I'm excited!

trollied

Hands up if you know what tinyfugue is :)

rhinoceraptor

I do some maintenance for a pretty old LambdaMOO instance that runs enCore, which gives it a (very 90s) web UI, along with a browser-based telnet client. Of course, that telnet client was a Java applet, so I replaced it with a websocket console, and a websocket server that proxies telnet to LambdaMOO.

One of the bigger challenges with the web UI is that HTTPS isn't really optional anymore, and the enCore database has a ton of `http://` links. So it requires a reverse proxy in front that can rewrite those, luckily in Nginx it's possible to use a small Javascript program to do it.

smirya0

Very cool! Is it still using cooperative multitasking? My understanding was MOO verbs/tasks run until the verb does suspend/fork or an input() call happens or something like that, or until the verb runs out of "ticks" and is killed by the VM. How do you do it?

Does it use async I/O / is it one thread still?

You might find this conversation interesting about multi-threading in LambdaMOO: https://groups.google.com/g/moo-talk/c/omF68ZM9rZc/m/B3f-jj4...

nrr

This makes me smile a lot. Whenever I pick up a new programming language, one of the first projects I tackle is writing a port of a similar MU* server because of the same breadth of concerns, so it's very nice seeing someone else recognize the complexity and take it on as a worthy challenge. (Though, this goes the extra mile and modernizes things; I've seldom accomplished that.)

I hadn't looked at doing this in Rust yet, so it'll definitely be interesting to give the code a read, particularly with the focus toward modernization.

Shekelphile

Good luck. As someone who used to work on a lambda-derived MUD it's great to see a little life left in that community. The original server was horribly outdated even 20 years ago.

I also found this project randomly on github at one point, not sure how far along it got to being usable: https://github.com/verement/etamoo

clouddrover

To see the original LambdaMOO in action:

telnet lambda.moo.mud.org 8888

fleeno

Is there anything else new or interesting going on in the Moo/Mu* space right now?

A while back I wrote a MU*-style system in Ruby, using js as the scripting language. It has a web based tool that gives object owners a URL for each object, which lets them edit the attributes and code in a better way than just line oriented editing. It also lets external services call back to that object to trigger actions.

I never did anything much with it though.

jonmarkgo

This is very cool! I have a MUD (that still has a fairly active playerbase) written in straight-up C. Been working on it 20+ years now, and always had some curiosity about rewriting it.

zellyn

I'm so happy someone did this. Rewriting LambdaMOO was on my long-term (mostly not going to do before I die) TODO list of project ideas! https://zellyn.com/page/projects/todo/

Very fun. I expect the parallelism will also be strikingly better with a modern design and implementation!

Very nice!

mindcrime

I've always wanted to see this kind of thing modernized and further developed.

I've had similar thoughts, so let me say "Congrats, this is awesome"! It definitely warms the cockles of my heart to see work like this. I just wish I had the free cycles to work on something similar (or even contribute to your project). But there are too many demands on my time right now. :-(

gilmore606

How are you handling concurrency/multithreading? I wrote a lot of MOOcode back in the day and often explicitly relied on the fact that property values couldn't change out from under me during a verb's runtime.

cpeterso

Suggested alternative names: “rooms” or “rumor”.

thelibrarian

For a name, how about LambdaROOM? Adds an 'R' for Rust, and is also a reference to the concepts of rooms in these games.

dang

LambdaMOO takes a new direction (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 - March 2020 (29 comments)

Lambda MOO Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20405167 - July 2019 (1 comment)

Lambda MOO Programming Resources - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16327975 - Feb 2018 (1 comment)

Exploring 3-Move – A LambdaMOO inspired environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075439 - April 2017 (15 comments)

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The "new direction" article was made famous by Clay Shirky in "A group is its own worst enemy". I won't list those here since it's a generic tangent but there are past threads at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....