M2Crypto Woes

Guido van Rossum ran into memory leakage problems with M2Crypto and wrote a rant on it.

Well, bugs to be fixed, is all. I had started to write a "proper" response to the rant, but at the moment my day job is quite fun and takes up all my time, so this will have to wait.

Oh, what the heck. Here are a couple of thoughts:

» OpenSSL has a large API that evolves organically and familiarity with using OpenSSL in C helps when one is using/interfacing OpenSSL from a more dynamic language via FFI.

» The more I work in Common Lisp and Smalltalk, the less partial I am to "solutions" involving FFIs to C libraries. Although, as a counter balance to this thought, the main reason to use Lisp or Smalltalk is because these languages are great at modeling the problem domain; oft times, interfacing a C library is the quickest way to get "low-level" infrastructure that supports the modeling.

I find myself warming to things like TLS Lite, a pure Python SSL/TLS implementation. A NATO project of mine is to write a parser that transforms it (or PureTLS, Java) into Common Lisp or Smalltalk.