Croquet (Re: [sldev] [AWG] Comments on SLGOGP Draft 1)

[Argent Stonecutter]

> There are other groups and organizations where Second Life isn't  
> the central focus which may be more what you are looking for in  
> that regard, such as Croquet/Qwak, Wonderland and so on, though of  
> course, each of them is more closed in some ways than Second Life  
> is expected to become.

Croquet in particular is a fascinating design, one that I'm still  
working to understand. It seems to require complete trust from all  
parties since it seems to distribute arbitrary Squeak code to all the  
viewers. I'm not sure how it avoids erroneous messages being  
inadvertently reinjected with inconsistent timestamps by a single  
instance of croquet code, except by careful coding of the objects  
themselves.

I don't think there's any intent that Croquet work in an insecure  
environment.

In any case, the way it's tied to a particular Smalltalk  
implementation seems to rule out it becoming an open system, but the  
distributed simulation model is well worth studying and learning  
from. It's really fascinating, and I recommend everyone here read the  
papers at least.