[Lasher]

I know your post is mostly a reflection on the past - why people made the decisions they did 1 year, 5 years, 10 years ago. That's a much longer answer for another time.

For anyone looking at starting a MUD today, whether from scratch or using a stock codebase, I just can't see a compelling reason to go through the learning curve of LPC or any other proprietary language.

Assuming someone has a decent amount of coding knowledge, integrating a LUA, Python or other interpreter is fairly staightforward. You have the advantage of potential builders learning a widely used language they can even put on their resume, all the flexibility of something like LPC, and still have the performance benefit of pure C on the back end.

Technology has moved on from the days I regretted not using LPC and thanks to LUA, all the things I wished we'd used LP Mud for in the past are now available. Pretty much all attributes of any MUD object are available to LUA and if we gave it access it could post notes, send emails, handle sockets itself, drive commands, handle delays and state, etc. There's even a LUA web server available. I haven't looked at embedding Python much personally but I believe that's the same way. We did experiment with a PHP integration using the Zend engine and it worked up to a point, but was cumbersome and we felt like we were constantly fighting with the technology rather than leveraging it - LUA on the other hand is designed to be used exactly for this kind of thing.

I remember contacting the owners of DGD at one time before starting the rewrite - they wanted 5 figures for a license and would only guarantee performance up to 200 online, it was a non-starter. Not to imply LP can't handle more than that, clearly it can, but it was the most they'd recommend officially.

Anyway, not to disrespect LPC, it's extremely powerful and was years ahead of its time. But looking at things today, I'm just not sure it makes sense any more if you don't already have a huge time investment in it.