> building alternatives and nobody used them
Right. I kind of forgot that MUDs are supposed to be social. Seeing as the popularity of MUDs plummeted, I also changed my goals over time: I want to build a persistent, text-based (but with rich formatting support, including eventually GUI widgets) live programmable environment with network transparency and multiple concurrent sessions allowed. Since it's personal/local space first, and only allows others to "visit" (and even that is mostly for my own remote sessions), I don't need many users initially. If I was trying to build something that emphasizes the multi-user aspect, the choice of continuing one of the historical lineages would be much harder to avoid.
> Secondly, existing "mainstream" languages are not appropriate, mostly. None of them or their runtimes are really based on a properly sandboxed persistent model.
You're right. And even if you broaden the search so much that "mainstream" is barely visible from the cut-off point, you're left with basically just Smalltalk. My current attempt is based on GToolkit distribution of Pharo Smalltalk - it does check some boxes, but it's class-based (not a big problem given the dynamism) and VERY single-user by design (quite a big problem, and thinking about eventual security/permissions/capabilities handling gives me a headache). Still, from all the prototypes I made over the years, this attempt went the farthest; I think I'll stick with it for a while longer.
> Finally, I have all sorts of ideas on what I think is "better" than MOO
Thank you, I will definitely check it out :)
> But the TLDR is that one of the arguments you pass to the system at start is basically a source directory of ("objdef") human readable / editable source files, and that gets compiled into a persistent binary database.
Thanks. That's exactly how a Smalltalk image is built, too, at least with the tooling I'm using (GT). You start an image, point it to a set of Git repos with Smalltalk code, which is then loaded into the image, classes are created, and methods get compiled. You then dump the new image. When you start it the next time, it already contains all the code, and you can change it inside the image at runtime, as much as you want. At some point, you export the changed code back to Git repos, and regenerate the image. Since the image contains all the live objects as well, you can close it, and all the state is restored when you reopen it.
Thanks for the Discord invite, I just joined. I'll go over the book and try to run mooR and mica first, and will reach out for help if needed.
For mica specifically: I'm not 100% sure, but I seem to remember you describing the idea behind it much earlier (here on HN) than this spring. I think it was in comments under a Python-Prolog bridge or something like that. Good to see you had the time and motivation to implement it :) I'll definitely give it a read!