Omega Point

Miguel de Icaza on the LSL-to-Mono port

Mono project founder Miguel de Icaza writes about Lin­den Lab’s pre­sen­ta­tion at Lang.NET 2006 in which Cory and Bab­bage Lin­den described the upcom­ing move to the Mono CLI.

The chal­lenge is to stop and save a run­ning script. This is some­thing that is rel­a­tively easy done with their script­ing lan­guage, but it becomes trick­ier with the CLI.

Their imple­men­ta­tion instru­ments the gen­er­ated CIL assem­bly to allow any script to sus­pend itself and resume exe­cu­tion on demand. This is a bit like con­tin­u­a­tions, the main dif­fer­ence is that the script does not con­trol when it is sus­pended, the run­time does. The instru­men­ta­tion basi­cally checks on every back-branch and on every call site whether the script should stop (in Jim’s words, “even­tu­ally, you run out of method, or you run out of stack”) and if it must stop, it jumps to the end of the method where a lit­tle stub has been injected that saves the state in a helper class and returns.

A very clever idea. Hope­fully the slides for the pre­sen­ta­tion will be posted soon.

I’d very much like to have attended that pre­sen­ta­tion, and I’d be inter­ested in see­ing those slides as well.

Fol­low­ing my attorney’s advise I have obtained a Sec­ond Life account.

Wel­come to Sec­ond Life, Miguel!

(Link stolen from Baba Sucks.)