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08/16/2006: "Lisp -- the dark side"

Mosquito Lisp is a network-oriented and compact Lisp with strong influence from Scheme and Erlang. It is available as part of the Mosquito Remote Execution Framework (MOSREF) distribution, and there is a Reference Manual.

Mosquito Lisp is:

* 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.

Mosquito is a secure remote execution framework that combines high-grade cryptography and a small efficient virtual machine on both ends to ensure that intellectual property is protected. It also presents a dynamic environment on a target host that can be reprogrammed on the fly over a secure communications channel to fit the current situation.

The virtual (Lisp) machine was written from scratch for this purpose, with a built in cryptography library, and is optimized for size with an eye towards being able to inject it remotely. The virtual machine's native programming environment is a Scheme-derived Lisp-family language, with an optimizing bytecode compiler. It is also cross-platform using ANSI C and GCC, currently running on OpenBSD, Darwin, Linux, and Win32.

Compiled bytecode is portable between these platforms.

So much for "Lisp is bloated" and "Lisp is slow". Now that the leading edge of the network hacker community is using Lisp in their attacks, how long will it be before the application and operating system communities re-discover Lisp as a (perhaps the) only way to twart those same attacks?

To bad Tim O'Reilly still doesn't grok Lisp. Maybe he'll understand before Web 3.0.