unix-junkie

I'm a former nmap core developer and even though I no longer actively contribute the project still is very close to my heart. It wasn't "revolutionary" at first, in that port scanning was already a thing, there were multiple available scanners out there. Most of these tools had their own syntax though, and they usually offered one specific type of scan. So nmap came and aggregated everything into a relatively simple tool. It then became incredibly successful and from that popularity nmap got its greatest strengths IMHO : portability, versatility (these crazy options implemented to satisfy super-specific needs) and the OS and service version signatures captured as a collaborative effort over more than a decade!

Thanks Fyodor & team!

I would add "The Formation of the Scientific Mind" by Gaston Bachelard. This text analyses the nature of the mental patterns that prevent from making actual discoveries (what he calls "epistemoligical obstacles").

nmap dev here.

Nmap is already asynchronous, as you described multiple requests are multiplexed (cf select(2), epoll(7), kqueue/kevent depending on your platform...)

The core difference between nmap and zmap is that the latter is stateless. Which allows a much higher throughput, but also prevents from applying some smart detection mechanisms. Thus, both tools are complementary, and no, there is no work being done to make nmap stateless.

I don't get it, it seems to me that this fix is incorrect.

It's pointless to check for such a signed integer overflow after it happened.