bap

Well, you could use arrays of optional bytes, but are use sure it's clever? Maybe it's much better to define an abstract module of type module type Mem = sig type t val get_byte : t -> ~offset:int -> char option end And invent some clever (maybe lazy) implementation using just Bigarray? BAP also has something like this in https://github.com/BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap/blob/master/li... You could ask about BAP in general on https://discuss.ocaml.org/ especially https://discuss.ocaml.org/u/ivg/summary (one of the guys behind BAP, very clever and talented in explaining stuff)

>the linker is using immutable lists of optional bytes to represent memory images Why would you use linked list instead of Bytes, Bigarrays or Arrays? You are doing it wrong, take a look at BAP's memory representation: https://github.com/BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap/tree/master/li... https://binaryanalysisplatform.github.io/bap/api/master/argo... Looked at your code, damn it's bad, I'd really suggest to dive into BAP sources and documentation a bit to understand how to write OCaml. It feels like you are trying to write in OCaml as in some different language, Haskell maybe, not using modules and functors. Reminds me how J people write C. You could write `fun x y z -> ...` instead of `fun x -> fun y -> fun z -> ...`, it's also better to write signatures (with docstrings) in separate .mli files (much easier to read and generate docs), if you u

But monads are a version of small-stem semantics. And the write linker, so something that operates low-level data, not an actual low-level code, OCaml is a great language for that. Take a look at BAP, it heavily uses OCaml features and implements a beautiful design: https://github.com/BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap https://binaryanalysisplatform.github.io/bap/api/master/argo... I'm not convinced that OCaml is unsuitable for such tasks.

There are other similar platforms (listing biggest ones): 1. BAP (OCaml) - https://github.com/BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap 2. BinCAT (OCaml) - https://github.com/airbus-seclab/bincat 3. radare2 (C) + radeco (Rust)(WIP) - https://github.com/radare/radare2 + https://github.com/radare/radeco-lib 4. Falcon (Rust) (WIP) - https://github.com/falconre/falcon And a bunch of others, less common or less featureful.