Stunt Status Update

[Todd Sundsted]

All is not quiet on the Stunt front, even though the ongoing work may
not be visible.

Steve Wainstead, creator of Waverous (http://code.google.com/p/
waverous/), has been rolling his C++ patches (http://
waverous.blogspot.com/) into a fork of Stunt (https://github.com/
wainstead/stunt). My feeling has been that sometime between LambdaMOO
1.8.1 and ~1.8.3, certain features in the code base (ad hoc exception
handling in the string code...) made a great argument for a transition
to C++. Luckily, Steve has already done the hard work :-)

I have also started work on the next feature set for Stunt. The major
pieces are currently:

1) Fixing the of the lingering server-crasher bugs related to
malicious/incorrect programs.
2) Adding support for ref-counted, anonymous objects (just like
regular objects except no object number).
3) Adding support for indexes on properties across descendants, along
with query built-ins for quickly finding matching objects.
4) Better random options (probably just using /dev/random or /dev/
srandom).

The exact set of features may change, however. If things work out,
for this release, the features will appear in both the C and C++
branches of the server.

I am also just about ready to release a heavily improved version of
Improvise -- the first version which I consider actually usable. And
if I'm lucky, it will also contain the first draft cut of an actual
web-aware, modular VR/gaming core.

Todd