User talk:Tedd Maa/stand-alone script engine

• Although this is interesting Tedd, it doesn't seem to keep in mind one very fundamental issue: computations at the server end have limited scalability, relative to any of the pressure points on scaling, which all derive from population pressure in one way or another. No matter how we partition computing resources server-side, there will always be a key computational workload there for physics etc, so in general there is only limited power left over for ambitious scripting. While we'd all like high-powered in-world scripting, that's just not going to happen as long as the only available computing horsepower for scripting is server-side.

• Although it's not going to happen for a long time, relatively unlimited scripting power is ultimately going to have to come by harnessing the clients, through server-side orchestration of partitioned tasks distributed very dynamically across all connected participants. This is the only source of computing power that both scales with population and offers massive resource per leaf node. What's more, with multicore CPUs everywhere (and with very little work for them to do because desktop apps tend not to be structured for parallelism), this is one resource that has a very bright future.

• So, while you offer some interesting things to think about here, if you want to look ahead to a future of high-powered server-side scripting, you really need to think about workload offloading too. (That's still "server-side scripting", even though the computations are distributed and run client-side, because such computations can never under any circumstances affect the client state; "client-side scripting" is a different matter altogether.) --Morgaine Dinova 04:18, 15 October 2007 (PDT)