Script programming strategies for high-load servers

I have a MMORPG server in C++, I've never done scripting before and from my point of view I think it would be degrading to the overall performance of the server if I parse scripts on the go (I haven't tested though), but I would like to have such functionality.

What good scripting开发者_开发知识库 techniques for multi-threaded environments that you would suggest/use? A book or an article would be nice too, preferably related to C++ but I don't mind other languages.

Thanks.

I believe the majority of commonly used scripting languages perform parsing as a separate step to execution, so that wouldn't be a significant performance cost. Usually they compile to some kind of bytecode format (Python, Lua and Perl all do this for example), and often that format can be serialised and loaded directly from disk.

There are implementations of scripting languages that compile to native code. For example, you could try javascript and Google's v8 engine, which (as far as I'm aware) compiles everything to native code before execution.

v8 is of course used in Chrome, which is a multi-process environment, so I would imagine it would work perfectly well in a multi-threaded environment (I can't claim personal experience of that though).

There are also JIT compilers for languages that are typically compiled to bytecode (for example, Psyco for python, and LuaJit for Lua). These are often not in sync with the latest version of the main language distribution though.

I think you want to check out Node.js.

It is a high performance multi threaded engine built on top of Google's V8 engine. It's extremely fast and built to be for scaling to huge levels.