After slaving over my homework and my project all semester long, it's looking like I'll finally have some free time to get back into DM for a little while. To make things a little less vague with the more advanced concepts in DM, I'm looking to find the overlap between the conventional programming language and DM. Here are my two questions:
1. Is a datum treated like a class in Java?
2. Can the spawn() function basically be classified as multithreading?
This explanation certainly clears the air for me-- thanks!
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Super Saiyan X wrote:
It's a form of psuedo-multithreading. It's not actual multithreading. It's a form of asynchronous programming and it's nothing special. | |
http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=1638359
DM uses a synchronous scheduler to determine task priority. spawn and sleep merely pop a task out of sync and then pop it into the scheduler to wait and do it at another time. The difference is that spawn is non-blocking, and sleep is blocking. | |
The funny thing is that sleep() and spawn() are basically identical, mechanically. Both of them duplicate the current proc, but only spawn() will keep going.
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FKI wrote:
So by that, sleep() is just as bad [as spawn()]? I don't know what you mean by "as bad". There's nothing inherently bad about sleep or spawn. | |
Referring to the overhead incurred by the latter.
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Yeah, of course. Every object definition (each "type") is a class.
In Java terms;
datum is like the Object class.
atom extends datum.
movable extends atom.
mob extends movable.
obj extends movable.
turf extends atom.
area extends atom.
In a sense; movable, atom, datum should be considered abstract classes or interfaces; and mob, obj, turf and area implement them. You're really not /supposed/ to use them as standalone things.
It's a form of psuedo-multithreading. It's not actual multithreading.