Porting code is the process of translating a program or script from one language to another. Porting code between two languages is conceptually very simple but can be quite difficult in practice because it requires an understanding of both languages. Translating between two very similar languages, such as C and C++, is often made easier because the languages have similar syntax, functions, and so on. On the other hand, translating between two very different languages, such as Java and Perl, is complicated because the languages share very little syntax and have radically different design methodologies, development frameworks, and core philosophies.

NASL has more in common with languages such as C and Perl than it does with highly structured languages like Java and Python. C and NASL are syntactically very similar, and NASL's loosely typed variables and convenient high-level string manipulation functions are reminiscent of Perl. Typical NASL scripts use global variables and a few functions to accomplish their tasks. For these reasons, you will probably find it easier to port between C or Perl and NASL than to port between Java and NASL. Fortunately, Java exploits are not as common as C or Perl exploits. A brief review of exploits found that approximately 90.0 percent of exploits were written in C, 9.7 percent were written in Perl, and 0.3 percent were written in Java.