So you want to learn more about game engines and write one yourself? That's awesome! To help you on your journey, here are some recommendations of C++ libraries and dependencies that will help you hit the ground running.
ACME-client for Tarantool
4 min
Tutorial
Link to GitHub. More details about the operation of the algorithm and the module can be found here.
The ACME protocol client is used to automatically obtain a security certificate for your site. Basically everyone uses Let's Encrypt to get a free certificate and auto-renewal. But there are other services, such as Zero SSL. It also supports the ACME protocol.
I relied on two articles from Habr (this and this), as well as RFC8555. But the information in them was not enough to implement their own version of the modulation. At least several times higher than several implementations of the module [at another level]. The tests were conducted on a live service, so there are no autotests yet. You can write and init pull request.
The module is written under Linux. Only the second version of the protocol is considered.
How to build a high-performance application on Tarantool from scratch
33 min
Tutorial
I came to Mail.ru Group in 2013, and I required a queue for one task. First of all, I decided to check what the company had already got. They told me they had this Tarantool product, and I checked how it worked and decided that adding a queue broker to it could work perfectly well.
I contacted Kostja Osipov, the senior expert in Tarantool, and the next day he gave me a 250-string script that was capable of managing almost everything I needed. Since that moment, I have been in love with Tarantool. It turned out that a small amount of code written with a quite simple script language was capable of ensuring some totally new performance for this DBMS.
Today, I’m going to tell you how to instantiate your own queue in Tarantool 2.2.
The Anatomy of LuaJIT Tables and What’s Special About Them
10 min
I don't know about you, but I really like to get inside all sorts of systems. In this article, I’m going to tell you about the internals of Lua tables and special considerations for their use. Lua is my primary professional programming language, and if one wants to write good code, one needs at least to peek behind the curtain. If you are curious, follow me.
Tarantool Data Grid: Architecture and Features
6 min
In 2017, we won the competition for the development of the transaction core for Alfa-Bank's investment business and started working at once. (Vladimir Drynkin, Development Team Lead for Alfa-Bank's Investment Business Transaction Core, spoke about the investment business core at HighLoad++ 2018.) This system was supposed to aggregate transaction data in different formats from various sources, unify the data, save it, and provide access to it.
In the process of development, the system evolved and extended its functions. At some point, we realized that we created something much more than just application software designed for a well-defined scope of tasks: we created a system for building distributed applications with persistent storage. Our experience served as a basis for the new product, Tarantool Data Grid (TDG).
I want to talk about TDG architecture and the solutions that we worked out during the development. I will introduce the basic functions and show how our product could become the basis for building turnkey solutions.
Тarantool Cartridge: Sharding Lua Backend in Three Lines
8 min
In Mail.ru Group, we have Tarantool, a Lua-based application server and a database united. It's fast and classy, but the resources of a single server are always limited. Vertical scaling is also not the panacea. That is why Tarantool has some tools for horizontal scaling, or the vshard module [1]. It allows you to spread data across multiple servers, but you'll have to tinker with it for a while to configure it and bolt on the business logic.
Good news: we got our share of bumps (for example, [2], [3]) and created another framework, which significantly simplifies the solution to this problem.
Тarantool Cartridge is the new framework for developing complex distributed systems. It allows you to concentrate on writing business logic instead of solving infrastructure problems. Under the cut, I will tell you how this framework works and how it could help in writing distributed services.
12.3 million of concurrent WebSockets
19 min
Recovery Mode
One thing about WebSockets is that you need a lot of resources on the client's side to generate high enough load for the server to actually eat up all the CPU resources.
There are several challenges you have to overcome because the WebSockets protocol is more CPU demanding on the client's side than on the server's side. At the same time you need a lot of RAM to store information about open connections if you have millions of them.
I've been lucky enough to get a couple of new servers for a limited period of time at my disposal for the hardware "burnout" tests. So I decided to use my Lua Application Server — LAppS to do both jobs: test the hardware and perform the LAppS high load tests.
Lua in Moscow 2019: Interview with Roberto Ierusalimschy
19 min
Some time ago, the creator of Lua programming language, Roberto Ierusalimschy, visited our Moscow office. We asked him some questions that we prepared with the participation of Habr.com users also. And finally, we’d like to share full-text version of this interview.
NodeMCU simple driver model (SDM) showcase: dynamic user interface
8 min
Tutorial
NodeMCU is an interactive firmware, which allows running Lua interpreter on the ESP8266 microcontroller (ESP32 support is in development). Alongside with all the regular hardware interfaces, it has WiFi module and SPIFFS file system.
This article describes the new module for the NodeMCU — sdm. SDM stands for simple driver model and it provides device-driver model abstraction for the system. In the first part of this article we will discuss the model itself and in the second part will be a showcase of dynamically created web user interface using sdm with some commentaries.
VShard — horizontal scaling in Tarantool
14 min
Hi, my name is Vladislav, and I am a member of the Tarantool development team. Tarantool is a DBMS and an application server all in one. Today I am going to tell the story of how we implemented horizontal scaling in Tarantool by means of the VShard module.
Some basic knowledge first.
There are two types of scaling: horizontal and vertical. And there are two types of horizontal scaling: replication and sharding. Replication ensures computational scaling whereas sharding is used for data scaling.
Sharding is also subdivided into two types: range-based sharding and hash-based sharding.
Range-based sharding implies that some shard key is computed for each cluster record. The shard keys are projected onto a straight line that is separated into ranges and allocated to different physical nodes.
Hash-based sharding is less complicated: a hash function is calculated for each record in a cluster; records with the same hash function are allocated to the same physical node.
I will focus on horizontal scaling using hash-based sharding.
Lua In Moscow 2019 conference program
4 min
As announced in the previous post, on March 3 (the first Sunday of March) Mail.ru Group’s Moscow office will be hosting the third international Lua conference, Lua in Moscow 2019. See schedule details under the cut.
Lua in Moscow 2019 conference
1 min
On the first Sunday of March, Mail.ru Group’s Moscow office will be hosting the third international Lua conference, Lua in Moscow 2019. The program features talks by Roberto Ierusalimschy and the leading experts in Lua and LuaJIT from Russia and other countries.
Lua is a unique programming language used not only in computer games, but also as an embedded language in such web-programming products as Redis, nginx, Tarantool, OpenResty. Lua is also used for big data analysis and scientific calculations. You can find Lua in many routers, printers and other devices.
You are welcome to join, even if you haven’t been writing in Lua so far. We bet the conference will give you unexpected insights!