Friday, June 6, 2008

Surprised by Loud Noises..

A few days ago, Wes Brown wrote an article on Matasano Chargen about design choice I made for the Mosquito Secure Remote Execution Framework (MOSREF) to go from Lua to Mosquito Lisp (MOSVM). Within a matter of hours there were some very interesting questions about why we had stopped working on Mosquito Lisp, and the usual outrage about my dislike for Lua. 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. There has been some activity on Matasano Chargen and Pensieri di un Lunatico Minore about the future of Mosquito Lisp and MOSVM, reminding me that there were programmers interested in the MOSREF project because of our Lisp dialect, as well as security professionals. While I have continued working on my fork of MOSVM, Wasp Lisp, I have not been terribly public about it because I thought there was no audience. Due to this reminder that other people are, indeed, watching and interested, I will bump up Wasp in my personal priorities -- above Kabuki and KoVM; I really would love to have a production quality application of the concepts we introduced in Mosquito Lisp.