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Richard M · 21-04-2004, 15:09

I want to start work on a very large project soon and can't decide which language to write it in.

Basically, the program will be a "life simulator" on a very basic level - think of a group of ants running around, gathering food and giving birth to more etc.
This program will run as a server and will work on it's own in the background with no need for any interaction.
The way interaction will occur is by outputting lots of figures, e.g. current virtual time, number of inhabitants, ages of inhabitants, current location in the "world", via TCP/IP (local or remotely) to any client program that requests it.
I imagine that I will be using MySQL (separately or the embedded version) to store all the data produced.

It really gets interesting when it comes to the client software, because the server only outputs data over TCP/IP connections this means that a Perl/PHP script on a remote server can grab the data for use on a webpage or even a DirectX game could use this to give a visual display of what's going on in this virtual world (again on the local machine, on the network or on the internet).

I'm a bit stuck on the language to use though, I thought about using C but dismissed this.
I could use any of the following though:
C++
Anything which uses Microsoft .NET, e.g. VisualSomething
PHP
Perl
Python
The last three wouldn't really be suitable though because they just execute once and that's it - they wouldn't be able to run forever in the background (with some exceptions, like Perl:Tk but even this is still calling other functions from within the main loop).

Any other recommendations?

21-04-2004, 15:09	#1
Richard M Inactive Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Los Angeles, CA Age: 47 Posts: 6,343	Programming - which language for this project? I want to start work on a very large project soon and can't decide which language to write it in. Basically, the program will be a "life simulator" on a very basic level - think of a group of ants running around, gathering food and giving birth to more etc. This program will run as a server and will work on it's own in the background with no need for any interaction. The way interaction will occur is by outputting lots of figures, e.g. current virtual time, number of inhabitants, ages of inhabitants, current location in the "world", via TCP/IP (local or remotely) to any client program that requests it. I imagine that I will be using MySQL (separately or the embedded version) to store all the data produced. It really gets interesting when it comes to the client software, because the server only outputs data over TCP/IP connections this means that a Perl/PHP script on a remote server can grab the data for use on a webpage or even a DirectX game could use this to give a visual display of what's going on in this virtual world (again on the local machine, on the network or on the internet). I'm a bit stuck on the language to use though, I thought about using C but dismissed this. I could use any of the following though: C++ Anything which uses Microsoft .NET, e.g. VisualSomething PHP Perl Python The last three wouldn't really be suitable though because they just execute once and that's it - they wouldn't be able to run forever in the background (with some exceptions, like Perl:Tk but even this is still calling other functions from within the main loop). Any other recommendations?