Re: NMap Scripts Vs Nessus

[Djalal Harouni <tixxdz () gmail com>]

On 2010-08-03 16:04:47 +0200, Drazen Popovic wrote:
> Hi Jacky.
> I'm a rather new NSE script developer and have experience in NASL
> scripting for the OpenVAS project which is an open source alternative to
> Nessus. From the perspective of a NASL developer I must say that the
> NASL language itself is a pain in the ass. It lacks many things that
> today modern scripting languages must have, and as such code written in
> it suffers in quality. And yes I'm aware that programmers are the ones
> responsible (including me) but the language itself doesn't help. Take a
> fact of tons of discussions OpenVAS guys (and probably Nessus) had on
> introducing another scripting language. The decision to have NASL as a
> main programming language made OpenVAS/Nessus guys maintainers of the
> language, and thus a little or none improvement is made.
>  
> On the other side Lua is a beautiful little language which is rather
> popular and as such Lua has its own maintainers that have nothing to do
> with NMAP project. NSE offers tons of libs of very good quality which in
> turns make scripts that use it the same.
In *general* programming languages are better handled by experienced
academic people, and this is the case with Lua.

Yes Lua is cool, and I'll definitively use it in any future project
which needs an embedded scriptig language, as Lua is designed for this
task, but in the other hand I don't know if we can use NASL in other
projects.

And finally: every one can checkout the svn and code (and send) his cool
script that other projects don't have.

-- 
tixxdz
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