Actually have yet to figure out what the point of tornado
is, and whether there's any real potential there. Insight
appreciated.
What's the point? Well... does it really need a point? It
could, after all, be art.
Whimsey aside, Tornado's a niche VM, by design and intent. Most
people don't have the need to run arbitrary small programs against
large quantities of data, or to run massively threaded programs in a
restricted environment, potentially across a large number of machines
(distributing the programs with the data).
If that's the case, it's a cute little indulgence by a guy with some
free time and a few things he feels like fiddling with.
On the other hand, there certainly are some areas where what it does
(when it's finished, potentially before) can be quite handy.
- It should be good for doing multiple interacting agent work for
simulations, where the massive (portable) threading is a win.
- It should be good for doing real physics simulations where
the threading, vector, and distribution should be a win.
- It should be good for doing configurable crypto, where the
decryption program is shipped with the thing to be decrypted. (And
really, would you allow arbitrary binary code to run on your
machine? In a sandboxed, restricted VM you probably would)
- It should be good for writing game engine bits. NPC/creature AIs,
user-written agents or actions, or suchlike things. (Every object
could, potentially, be its own little program interacting with the
universe)
Definitely niche, no question. But it's an interesting niche...
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