gomud

I needed an excuse to learn go, and none of the usual candidate projects that I usually use to pick up a new language seemed to fit well. I was thinking back to how I started programming, and the transition from hobby programming to professional was largely thanks to working as a creator on Discworld MUD. It struck me that a MUD could be the perfect platform, given the support for concurrency and networking. And then I realised it would be even more interesting to write a MUD engine that others could use to develop MUDs. So I did: gomud.

Right now you can define rooms that have exits, players are persistent (though there are no passwords yet) and supported commands include ‘say’, ‘tell’, ‘me’, ‘shout’, ‘who’, ‘look’, and ‘go’.

Future plans include defining commands through data for easy expansion, add passwords for players, items, creatures, and then things like combat, skills, etc.

It turns out that it really is the perfect vehicle for learning go. The network support and concurrency in the language lend themselves really well to the core loop for a MUD, and the message passing works wonders for sending text to different connected players. Built in testing means that unit test coverage is strong, and it’s really easy to hack something up that works before iterating it into something more modular and well-structured.

If you can’t tell, I’m somewhat enamoured with both the project, and the language. I’m open to pull requests, so if you also want to get started with the language, or if you want to use it to build a MUD, please get in touch and help me build something neat.