Although it is in one way brand new, GOSSIP already has quite a history. There probably isn't any code left from previous incarnations, but a lot of the early design decisions still influence the current implementation.
In its former life, GOSSIP wasn't called GOSSIP, of course. It was called sim. It was started while I (Marius) was working as a student at the Institute for Communication Technology. The initiator was Thorsten Herfet and the project was further nurtured by Thorsten Tödtmann. Thorsten T. wrote lots of code and made lots of poor students use the tool. There is still a web page about the old sim. I don't know if they are still using it.
The journey from nothing to sim and from sim to GOSSIP was roughly like this: Naturally, the institute was doing simulations of their communications systems, and they wanted to have a tool to facilitate this. The tool should allow the composition of independently developed programs, and allow only strictly controlled communication between these components. Restricting the communication was desired so that one could be fairly sure that no information reached a component that wouldn't reach it in the real system. The components should run in separate processes, so that it was easy to point fingers when one component caused a crash. Of course, components were written in C or C++, and even ever so small bugs in these languages cause a program to fall over in obscure and unintelligible ways, so having a simulation crash due to a faulty component happened quite often.
The original sim thus consisted of a C++ API that people were supposed to write their components against. This API was implemented by a library and each component was compiled into a separate executable. There was a control program that could interpret a simple description language. This control program would start all needed programs and connect them via Unix pipes. Communication between the components would happen over these pipes.
Of course, performance sucked big time and the description language quickly became inadequate because it didn't have any `advanced' features like arithmetic expressions or loops.
My recollection is hazy about what happened next in what sequence, but sim moved from putting components into processes to linking them as shared libraries (without changing the API significantly!), and we made it use TCL as the description language instead of our home grown one.
Around that time, RMS launched the "Why you should not use TCL" debate, and indeed, we have found that it was quite easy to reach TCL's limitations. I tried to write a static scheduler in TCL to speed up the execution of typical simulations, but I nearly lost all my hair over this. So, in a fit of Do the Right Thing, I decided to replace TCL with the Scheme implementation Guile. I have not regretted it since. Almost all of the control program is now written in Scheme, including a static scheduler, and the description language is Scheme, too.
Like it is in a University setting, people moved on to other tasks, and maintainance of sim languished. However, recently, I had to use a certain proprietary stream driven simulator, and it annoyed me greatly. I thought I could do better than that, because in some senses sim already was better.
I decided to return to sim and make it into a usable piece of software that is superior to proprietary tools simply by being Free Software.
The old sim lacked some important features, like feedback loops, delays, a clean way to manage libraries of components, and a good name. So I decided to redo most of sim incrementally, and published the result on Sourceforge as the GOSSIP project. I hope that enough people will find it useful to keep it alive.