Important!

This is experimental and (currently) incomplete software. It is not yet usable, although with further development it is hoped that it soon will be.

At present, all the code will do is (optionally) load a database file and present a REPL interface for running commands and evaluating MOO code from the console as if you had connected as a wizard. While most MOO code will run correctly, there are still some built-in functions that are not yet implemented. Also, notably, there is almost no network functionality, and no way to save any changes made to the database. Finally, there has been no effort to optimize any performance bottlenecks, of which loading a database is at least one.

Once the code is in at least a minimally useful state, this message will be updated or removed.

EtaMOO

EtaMOO is a new implementation of the LambdaMOO server written in Haskell.

LambdaMOO is a network-accessible, multi-user, programmable, interactive system well-suited to the construction of text-based adventure games, conferencing systems, and other collaborative software.

EtaMOO differs from LambdaMOO in a few significant ways:

• EtaMOO is multi-threaded. MOO tasks run concurrently, producing network output and changes to the database in isolated transactions that are committed only when not in conflict with any other transaction. (In cases of conflict, transactions are automatically retried.) Separate threads are also used for network connection management, so for example name lookups do not block the entire server.

• In some cases, MOO values may be computed in a "lazy" manner, meaning the evaluation could be skipped if MOO code never fully inspects the result. This could be beneficial when large list structures are returned from built-in functions, for example.

• It is anticipated that EtaMOO will easily support 64-bit MOO integers and/or Unicode MOO strings via independent build options.

• EtaMOO supports IPv6.

The implementation of EtaMOO closely follows the specifications of the LambdaMOO Programmer's Manual, and should therefore be compatible with most LambdaMOO databases as of about version 1.8.3 of the LambdaMOO server code.

Installing

EtaMOO is built with Cabal, the Haskell package manager. In the simplest case, simply running:

cabal install EtaMOO

should automatically download, build, and install the etamoo executable after doing the same for all of its Haskell dependencies.

Cabal itself is part of the Haskell Platform which is available for many distributions and platforms.

EtaMOO has non-Haskell dependencies on two external libraries: libpcre (with UTF-8 support enabled) for regular expression matching, and, possibly, libcrypt (often part of the standard libraries) for the MOO crypt() built-in function. You may need to ensure you have these available before installing EtaMOO.