>How do you plan on migrating data from Mono's VM to Luau?
It helps a lot that you're only dealing with LSL that was compiled to .NET CIL by a single compiler and transformed into a state machine via an internal tool that predates `async` / `await` in .NET. Luckily you don't need a strategy that works for arbitrary .NET assemblies.
We can inspect those assemblies and the saved script state is stored in an LL-defined serialization format that includes everything on the stack / reachable via the heap. That could be converted to the script state serialization scheme we created for Luau.
The biggest complication would be that .NET CIL presents a stack-based bytecode whereas Lua(u) bytecode is register-based. There's prior art there, IIRC Android's Dalvik bytecode format is register-based and isn't generally compiled directly, you compile stack-based Java bytecode and the Android devkit has tools that convert it to stack-based Dalvik. We could use a similar scheme to convert the limited subset of CIL we need into Luau bytecode, possibly with some Dalvik-like extensions that allow use of "extended" registers for cases where we'd run into Luau's 255 register limit.
I'd like to eventually open-source SL's existing internal tooling for Mono so that people can get a better sense of the problem space and how that conversion would work. It really should have been public from the outset, and I believe the original author of SL's Mono integration wanted it to be.
Migrating existing Mono scripts onto Luau is a bit far out though, since we're still working on the core VM stuff.
It helps a lot that you're only dealing with LSL that was compiled to .NET CIL by a single compiler and transformed into a state machine via an internal tool that predates `async` / `await` in .NET. Luckily you don't need a strategy that works for arbitrary .NET assemblies.
We can inspect those assemblies and the saved script state is stored in an LL-defined serialization format that includes everything on the stack / reachable via the heap. That could be converted to the script state serialization scheme we created for Luau.
The biggest complication would be that .NET CIL presents a stack-based bytecode whereas Lua(u) bytecode is register-based. There's prior art there, IIRC Android's Dalvik bytecode format is register-based and isn't generally compiled directly, you compile stack-based Java bytecode and the Android devkit has tools that convert it to stack-based Dalvik. We could use a similar scheme to convert the limited subset of CIL we need into Luau bytecode, possibly with some Dalvik-like extensions that allow use of "extended" registers for cases where we'd run into Luau's 255 register limit.
I'd like to eventually open-source SL's existing internal tooling for Mono so that people can get a better sense of the problem space and how that conversion would work. It really should have been public from the outset, and I believe the original author of SL's Mono integration wanted it to be.
Migrating existing Mono scripts onto Luau is a bit far out though, since we're still working on the core VM stuff.