[Mono-dev] Coroutines, Monoco, and why we love them.

[Tomi Valkeinen]

Hi,

I though monoco was already gone and forgotten, but it seems I was 
mistaken =).

On Fri, 21 Nov 2008, Lucas Meijer wrote:

> Hi,
>
> At the Unite conference, I was delighted to meet up with Miguel, as that
> would let me underline the parts of mono (existing or nonexisting) that
> are very important to our mono using projects. He asked me if I could
> write a message to mono-dev explaining not only privately why these
> things are important to us.
>
> We're working on a multiplayer MMO game. The backend is written in c#
> running on mono, the client uses Unity3D, whose scripting is powered by
> mono.
>
> Eariler in the project the plan was to write the backend in Stackless
> Python, because of its coroutines support.  I was thrilled to find Tomi
> Valkeinen's MonoCo. (http://www.bat.org/~tomba/monoco.html) (Thanks
> Tomi!).  MonoCo brings stackless style coroutines to mono, and this made
> us switch to mono.

But remember that stackless python is, I think, more or less proper 
implementation while Monoco is basically just a hack.

<snip>

> Please realize I'm not saying that the current implementation of MonoCo
> is good (or bad). I'm just looking at it from a user's point of view. I
> know next to nothing about the internals of the VM.

I think Monoco implementation is interesting in hacking sense, but it not 
what I would call a proper one. It is also inefficient with long call 
chains, which is bad.

But I know what you mean, I would love to have real microthreads in Mono. 
I think microthreads are very powerfull and make many things much easier 
to code.

> Bye, Lucas

  Tomi