Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Interoperability Using Google Buffers

Work has been steady but slow on Wasp; as usual, I have been less interested in building that crucial foundation for a Wasp community than in using Wasp itself for my pet projects. Work on Wasp Core has been centered around getting the old LibEvent event loop restored, and backporting the TCP listener from Mosquito. Parts of WaspDoc have been backported as well, so it is easier to see what a Wasp Lisp module imports and exports. Outside of the Core, I have been having a lot of fun porting Google's Protocol Buffers API to Wasp. Google's protocol design resembles a less verbose version of the "Sickle" protocol I have used internally in my MUD servers; very elegant and more compact than my designs. The "protocol compiler" used by Google reminds me a lot of the Quincy protocol compiler we used at Ephemeral Security in IPAF, a protocol analysis framework that could be considered a predecessor to Mosquito's concurrency model. It is difficult to balance laying groundwork for Wasp users with my own entertainment.. It doesn't help that my wife is on me to finish the latest MUD server for her friends to use.