Hi there, I created NSIS originally and maintained it through the 1.x series (a mirror of the original web site is here: http://1014.org/code/nullsoft/nsis/ ht

Hi there, I created NSIS originally and maintained it through the 1.x series (a mirror of the original web site is here: http://1014.org/code/nullsoft/nsis/ http://1014.org/code/nullsoft/nsis/ ), before Kichik gracefully took over the project. I use NSIS extensively for my own projects. Given some of the comments here I thought I would mention a few things: When NSIS was first created (ca 2000), MSI did not yet exist and installers were big, fragile, and typically had many files. I made a custom installer for Winamp at some point, and then an installer-generator for Winamp plug-ins (PiMP), and later generalized that into NSIS. The script design: originally there was a list of files which would be extracted, shortcuts created, directories created, etc. The list would be processed in order. At some point Vinny from BearShare suggested (via a trivial patch) that we add conditional execution and/or looping. So that's how it ended up as "like assembly", since it was a bunch of instructions being executed. The string formatting was already there, so you don't have to manage strings, so in effect a very high level assembly. The point of writing NSIS installers is that you're really just programming a program, and the language you're using is very good at moving data around. It's not transactional, sure, but ideally if you write an NSIS installer, you can have it look at what's installed and make the correct decisions about upgrading/removing components as necessary. You can also automate the installers for network installs, plenty of system administrators do it now (/S and /D= options, in particular). The mentioned security bug in NSIS 2.1 was fixed in 2.51. Finally: last I checked with LZMA enabled, NSIS installers are very size efficient. If you program them well, they can be very robust. Anyway...