Mono/Forum Transcripts
Intro & Overview
Madhavi Linden (you): first, thank you all for your patience and for joining us today
Periapse Linden: hopefully soon I'll be joined by some other members of the Mono team
You: shall we start?
Periapse Linden: sure. Let me start by telling you who I am. I'm the PM for LL's Studio Icehouse, which started this incarnation of the Mono project last summer. The project is now in the hands of Babbage's Studio Blighty, and I'm sticking with it through the beta.
I would like to gauge ppl's familiarity with the Mono project before I go on. I don't want to give background on what it is and all if you are all already familiar. Who needs basic info on what Mono is, and what this project is about?
Eshi Otawara does
Gerome Mayne: me
Periapse Linden: kk
Periapse Linden: Mono is an open source virtual machine, part of the .net framework, as such it is known for its speed and stability. joejack Iuga: aha
Periapse Linden: About three years ago Babbage Linden considered how to bring Mono technology into Second Life. It has the promise of making scripts run faster, and the hope of using other languages to script SL
Gerome Mayne: ty
Eshi Otawara: ah
Gerome Mayne: i think i am in picture now
Periapse Linden: Because of several difficulties, and priorities, it wasn't until this summer that Babbage was able to really focus on this project. For this phase the purpose is to implement Mono as an alternative VM to the LSL2 VM that currently runs all SL scripts. So the focus is on getting LSL scripts to compile to Mono bytecode, and then have them run compatibly with the same script run under LSL2. Since the focus is on compatibility, we aren't changing LSL in any way for this project. Once the LSL -> Mono bytecode compiler was in place, around September, we went into QA. You can imagine how long a process this was, since there is just so much to test. After about three months of our internal QA hitting Mono with every script they could find, vehicles, communications, math scripts, even griefer scripts, we had come to the point where we knew there must still be. plenty of bugs, but they were beyond the ability of even our dedicated and passionate QA team to find
So that's how this public beta was born. We unleashed Mono on the beta grid for all of our ace resident scripters to bash at it and find bugs. Which we've been finding aplenty -- over three dozen in the past two weeks of our beta. Before I open this up for questions let me just give you some resources
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mono That's a good starting point. It has links to our beta FAQ, and tells you how you can download the beta client, which is the same one for havok4, since we are sharing aditi (the beta grid) with them.
Right now Mono is running on one host, four regions, on the beta grid. We're going to keep up this beta for at least another month, and maybe add some regions to it, like a water region, damage region, and maybe a teen-enabled one. Hopefully after that we will be confident about the stability and compatibility of Mono, and we'll then consider how to bring it to the mainland.
One last thing -- since this question always comes up: We do not expect to ever get rid of the LSL2 virtual machine. Scripts running under it never need to be recompiled to Mono -- that will be an option. At some point we *may* turn off the LSL compiler, so that all new scripts become Mono, but even that has not yet been planned out.