Mosquito Lisp
As I was perusing an interesting posting by the gang at Matasano, I came across a reference to Mosquito Lisp, which is a varient of Scheme designed specifically for mobile code injection in the network security arena. It was summarized on Smallworks as:
- Designed for network applications, Mosquito is highly concurrent and provides simple and efficient network and process APIs.
- Mosquito is highly portable, written in ANSI C, and is currently in active use on Darwin/PPC, Linux/x86, Windows 2000/XP, and OpenBSD/x86.
- Mosquito is compact, with the virtual machine weighing in at close to 128k on some platforms.
- Mosquito can be self-contained, applications may be linked on any Mosquito platform to run stand-alone on any other Mosquito platform.
- Bytecode generated by Mosquito’s compiler may be employed on any host platform without recompilation.
- The Mosquito environment is rich, with over 300 primitive functions and 200 library functions in the standard library. (Not including additional libraries specific to MOSREF.)
- The Mosquito environment is available under the LPGL, and is obtainable from Sourceforge.
I wasn’t familiar with it, so after much searching, I found a vestigial bit on Sourceforge. It’s not lost, but it looks to have been abandoned by the original authors 2-3 years ago. Time to look deeper into it.
This entry was posted at 10:15 pm on 2 June 2008 and is filed under Lisp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
It’s not entirely lost, but I have been really idle with it, lately.. Paying work comes first. :)
I’ve always been fascinated by “tiny” language implementations. OOVM was the last one I was interested in, unfortunately, it’s been capsized by an attempt to turn it into Java. I definitely understand the emphasis on pay. I’m wondering the relation on Mosquito Lisp to Wasp Lisp, vis a vis goals?
Surprised by Loud Noises…..
I was surprised to see how many people wanted to know why development of MOSVM had stopped; I had made some faulty assumptions about the community’s interest in MOSREF, MOSVM, and what would happen when Wes and I moved on to other things….
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Not quite abandoned. Just taken in a different non-specific direction by one of the original authors, Scott Dunlop. My own interest was in the security aspects, and while it was a beautiful language, it didn’t quite fulfill the goals that I had.
http://waspvm.blogspot.com/