moor VS rmoo

I think Haskell or OCaml would do a better job on the ADTs for a parse tree. When doing this, I found Rust's enums... anemic... and got very annoyed by the awkwardness of having to Box recursive types. I was reaching for the ability to continue to be able to pattern match on nodes while attaching common attributes (line numbers, etc.) and ended up having to bury everything 1 level deep in a struct which ended up feeling awkward.

That and Rust's iterators are terrible at introducing ownership agony.

In any case, I've ... done it (https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/crates/compiler/src/...) but can't say I liked it.

I do really like "pest" as a parser generator though.

See: https://github.com/rdaum/moor

I've been working on a rewrite of the server into Rust, for kicks: https://github.com/rdaum/moor

Unfortunately still lots of work there to be done, and I have no time.

I've done the "whole new thing" before, too. 20ish years ago, tho I only have a few fragments of what I worked on back then: https://github.com/rdaum/mica being one of them I found on an old drive. Not complete.

But sticking with compatibility has allowed me to enforce development discipline, basically. And then I'll move it onwards from there.

Re: world state / transactions -- yeah, basically all I/O and mutations happen in a transactional context, and then at commit time conflicts are resolved; if they're not resolve-able, the transaction is retried in a new state. As for overhead, yes potentially maybe a lot, but it's also a solvable problem; this is how an MVCC SQL database (like, even Postgres) works. TLDR it's likely inefficient now, but I believe I can make it efficient. And I think it's the best to solve the shared world state problem and still meet user's expectations of consistency.

Re: the MOO client, it's `rmoo.el`: https://github.com/lisdude/rmoo -- it's been around for a long time (25, 30 years?) and it and/or MOO.el (another emacs one) are how/why I learned emacs in the first place. I had to patch my local copy to make it work with emacs 29.1.

A friend of mine maintains a fork of RMOO, an Emacs MOO/MUD client. You might find it interesting: https://github.com/lisdude/rmoo