This reminds me of a server app I saw recently in a language called
Clojure. Clojure is a relatively new lisp variant targeting the JVM,
and has a home-grown STM layer built into the language. Anyway, the
app I saw was a (admittedly didactic-focused) multi-threaded MUD
server (google "clojure mire"), which could easy serve as the
foundation for a project like this. Thus, I would say that STM is up
for the challenge. The question in my mind would be whether or not
Haskell's graphics/video libraries are mature enough.
On May 7, 2009, at 6:28 AM, Benjamin L.Russell
<dekudekup...@yahoo.com> wrote:
One question that has been coming up at the back of my mind for the
past several weeks has been how difficult would it be to create a
collaborative multi-user online virtual world application in Haskell.
More specifically, last August, I came across a very interesting
application called Croquet (see
http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page), which happens to be
based on Squeak (see http://www.squeak.org/), a dialect of Smalltalk.
Croquet, in turn, provides the basis for Cobalt (see
http://www.duke.edu/~julian/Cobalt/Home.html), a "virtual workspace
browser and construction toolkit for accessing, creating, and
publishing hyperlinked multi-user virtual environments" (according to
the home page for that project).
What struck me as especially interesting was how Croquet allows
multiple users to collaborate together in a multi-user online virtual
world in software development and other collaborative projects. As
one application, the video clip on the upper-right-hand corner of the
above-mentioned Croquet home page illustrates how a user can, by
writing code from inside the application, create on-the-fly additional
virtual environments, which can then be entered by either the
programmer or other programmers. Other applications (shown in other
video clips on the "Screenshots/Videos" page (see
http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Screenshots/Videos) show
alternative applications that include text-based annotations, a 3D
spreadsheet, and writing a conventional blog from within a virtual
world.
Unfortunately, Smalltalk is an object-oriented language. If possible,
I would like to see something similar in a functional programming
language such as Haskell.
Does anybody know whether duplicating this project in Haskell would be
feasible?
-- Benjamin L. Russell
--
Benjamin L. Russell / DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com
http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/
Translator/Interpreter / Mobile: +011 81 80-3603-6725
"Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto."
-- Matsuo Basho^
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