Mono & Your Second Life

For about a year and a half Linden Labs have been planning to

compile the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) to CIL and run it on the Mono runtime embedded in Second Life. This allows us to take advantage of the advanced features of the Mono runtime like Just In Time (JIT) compilation to improve the performance of LSL execution, to extend LSL more easily and ultimately to allow the use of multiple programming languages and class libraries within SL.

I’ve now completed an initial version of the LSL to CIL compiler, implemented a test application which embeds the Mono runtime and run some performance tests comparing the current LSL interpreter with the embedded Mono runtime.

This has been put to one side, at least publicly, but a few days ago Babbage Linden announced that “the work on Mono took a significant step forward last week”, with the implication that work will begin in earnest once again.

So I looked around to find out some more about Mono, and I found the Mono Project’s monkeyguide. I merely noted it here to remind me to find some time to look into this more deeply.